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This got lost because of all the things happening, but there was also a car ramming attack today in Ra'anana, a little north of Tel Aviv, in which 17 Israelis were wounded and one was killed. It's being called a terror attack in the Western media, obviously. With that, plus Yemen's attack, the withdrawal of a division from Gaza, and now Iran, it's not a great day for imperialists overall.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/South-Africa-to-Sue-US-and-UK-as-Complicit-in-Gaza-Genocide-20240115-0009.html

The Department of State today is announcing the designation of Ansarallah, commonly referred to as the Houthis, as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist group, effective 30 days from today.

Since November, the Houthis have launched unprecedented attacks against international maritime vessels in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, as well as military forces positioned in the area to defend the safety and security of commercial shipping.  These attacks against international shipping have endangered mariners, disrupted the free flow of commerce, and interfered with navigational rights and freedoms.  This designation seeks to promote accountability for the group’s terrorist activities.  If the Houthis cease their attacks in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, the United States will reevaluate this designation.

The Houthis must be held accountable for their actions, but it should not be at the expense of Yemeni civilians.  As the Department of State moves forward with this designation, we are taking significant steps to mitigate any adverse impacts this designation may have on the people of Yemen.  During the 30-day implementation delay, the U.S. government will conduct robust outreach to stakeholders, aid providers, and partners who are crucial to facilitating humanitarian assistance and the commercial import of critical commodities in Yemen.  The Department of the Treasury is also publishing licenses authorizing certain transactions related to the provision of food, medicine, and fuel, as well as personal remittances, telecommunications and mail, and port and airport operations on which the Yemeni people rely.

god these motherfuckers. holding ansarallah accountable for trying to do anything to work against an active genocide

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It's really not Boeing's year, huh?

Boeing 747 engine catches fire, turns back and lands in Miami.

twitter thread

I just got back from Ukraine, where I was visiting some friends. Everything we have heard about what’s happening in Ukraine is a lie. The reality is darker, bleaker, and unequivocally hopeless. There is no such thing as Ukraine "winning" this war.

• By their estimates, they have lost over one million of their sons, fathers and husbands; an entire generation is gone.

Nazis and destroying the demographics of their own people, name a better duo

• Even in the Southwest, where the anti-Russian sentiment is long-standing, citizens are reluctant or straight-up scared to publicly criticize Zelensky; they will go to jail.
• In every village and town, the streets, shops, and restaurants are mostly absent of men.
• The few men who remain are terrified of leaving their homes for fear of being kidnapped into conscription. Some have resorted to begging friends to break their legs to avoid service.
• Army search parties take place early in the morning, when men leave their homes to go to work. They ambush and kidnap them off the streets and within 3-4 hours they get listed in the army and taken away straight to the front lines with minimal or no training at all; it is "a death sentence."
• It's getting worse every day. Where I was staying, a dentist had just been taken by security forces on his way to work, leaving behind two small children. Every day, 3-5 dead bodies keep arriving from the front lines.
• Mothers and wives fight tooth and nail with the armed forces, beg and plead not to have their men taken away. They try bribing, which sometimes works, but most of the time they are met with physical violence and death threats.
• The territory celebrated as having been "won back" from Russia has been reduced to rubble and is uninhabitable. Regardless, there is no one left to live there and displaced families will likely never return.
• They see the way the war has been reported, at home and abroad. It's a "joke" and "propaganda." They say: “Look around: is this winning?”.
• Worse, some have been hoaxed into believing that once Ukrainians forces are exhausted, American soldiers will come in to replace them and “win the war”.

There is no ambiguity in these people. The war was for nothing - a travesty. The outcome always was, and is, clear. The people are hopeless, utterly destroyed, and living in an unending nightmare. They are pleading for an end, any end - most likely the same "peace" that could have been achieved two years ago. In their minds, they have already lost, for their sons, fathers and husbands are gone, and their country has been destroyed. There is no "victory" that can change that.

Except the peace offer then (see under the The Objectives and Strategy of Russia section) was incredibly favorable for Ukraine (and naive on Russia's part), basically just security guarantees and no NATO membership, without any territorial changes. That ain't happening anymore.

Make no mistake, they are angry with Putin. But they are also angry with Zelensky and the West. They have lost everything, worst of all, hope and faith, and cannot comprehend why Zelenky wishes to continue the current trajectory, the one of human devastation. I didn't witness the war; but what I saw was absolutely heart-breaking. Shame on the people, regardless of their intentions, who have supported this war. And shame on the media for continuing to lie about it.

also lmao at the fucking community note

um actually the US says that only a few Ukrainians have died (based on propaganda fed to them by the Ukrainians)

OMG just listened to a bit of the speach milei gave at WEF and it's incredibly hilarious, completely unhinged ancap ideology and culture war stuff. They should bring in more like him

milei at Davos:

"The Socialists maintain that we humans are damaging the planet and that it must be protected at all costs, even going as far as advocating for the bloody agenda of abortion".

lmao?

not news exactly, but interesting article (well, excerpt from a book) with some insight on the Ukraine war, and more broadly about the difference between the Soviet/Russian and Western approaches to war (archived)

The Russian Art of War: How the West Led Ukraine to Defeat

Throughout the Cold War period, the Soviet Union saw itself as the spearhead of a historical struggle that would lead to a confrontation between the “capitalist” system and “progressive forces.” This perception of a permanent and inescapable war led the Soviets to study war in a quasi-scientific way, and to structure this thinking into an architecture of military thought that has no equal in the Western world. The problem with the vast majority of our so-called military experts is their inability to understand the Russian approach to war. It is the result of an approach we have already seen in waves of terrorist attacks—the adversary is so stupidly demonized that we refrain from understanding his way of thinking. As a result, we are unable to develop strategies, articulate our forces, or even equip them for the realities of war. The corollary of this approach is that our frustrations are translated by unscrupulous media into a narrative that feeds hatred and increases our vulnerability. We are thus unable to find rational, effective solutions to the problem.

The way Russians understand conflict is holistic. In other words, they see the processes that develop and lead to the situation at any given moment. ... The reason the Russians are better than the West in Ukraine is that they see the conflict as a process; whereas we see it as a series of separate actions. ... That is why we place the start of the conflict on February 24, 2022, or the start of the Palestinian conflict on October 7, 2023. We ignore the contexts that bother us and wage conflicts we do not understand.

Correlation of Forces

The Objectives and Strategy of Russia

Women and Minorities Bear the Brunt of Medical Misdiagnosis | naked capitalism

In a study published Jan. 8 in JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers found that nearly 1 in 4 hospital patients who died or were transferred to intensive care had experienced a diagnostic error. Nearly 18% of misdiagnosed patients were harmed or died.

In all, an estimated 795,000 patients a year die or are permanently disabled because of misdiagnosis, according to a study published in July in the BMJ Quality & Safety periodical.

Women and racial and ethnic minorities are 20% to 30% more likely than white men to experience a misdiagnosis, said David Newman-Toker, a professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the lead author of the BMJ study. “That’s significant and inexcusable,” he said.

Researchers call misdiagnosis an urgent public health problem. The study found that rates of misdiagnosis range from 1.5% of heart attacks to 17.5% of strokes and 22.5% of lung cancers.

Maternal mortality for Black mothers has increased dramatically in recent years. The United States has the highest maternal mortality rate among developed countries. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, non-Hispanic Black mothers are 2.6 times as likely to die as non-Hispanic white moms. More than half of these deaths take place within a year after delivery.

Research shows that Black women with childbirth-related heart failure are typically diagnosed later than white women, said Jennifer Lewey, co-director of the pregnancy and heart disease program at Penn Medicine. That can allow patients to further deteriorate, making Black women less likely to fully recover and more likely to suffer from weakened hearts for the rest of their lives.

Racial and gender disparities are widespread.

Women and minority patients suffering from heart attacks are more likely than others to be discharged without diagnosis or treatment.

Black people with depression are more likely than others to be misdiagnosed with schizophrenia.

Minorities are less likely than whites to be diagnosed early with dementia, depriving them of the opportunities to receive treatments that work best in the early stages of the disease.

Misdiagnosis isn’t new. Doctors have used autopsy studies to estimate the percentage of patients who died with undiagnosed diseases for more than a century. Although those studies show some improvement over time, life-threatening mistakes remain all too common, despite an array of sophisticated diagnostic tools, said Hardeep Singh, a professor at Baylor College of Medicine who studies ways to improve diagnosis.

“The vast majority of diagnoses can be made by getting to know the patient’s story really well, asking follow-up questions, examining the patient, and ordering basic tests,” said Singh, who is also a researcher at Houston’s Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center. When talking to people who’ve been misdiagnosed, “one of the things we hear over and over is, ‘The doctor didn’t listen to me.’”

Racial disparities in misdiagnosis are sometimes explained by noting that minority patients are less likely to be insuredthan white patients and often lack access to high-quality hospitals. But the picture is more complicated, said Monika Goyal, an emergency physician at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., who has documented racial bias in children’s health care.

In a 2020 study, Goyal and her colleagues found that Black kids with appendicitis were less likely than their white peers to be correctly diagnosed, even when both groups of patients visited the same hospital.

Demanding schedules, which prevent doctors from spending as much time with patients as they’d like, can contribute to diagnostic errors, said Karen Lutfey Spencer, a professor of health and behavioral sciences at the University of Colorado-Denver. “Doctors are more likely to make biased decisions when they are busy and overworked,” Spencer said. “There are some really smart, well-intentioned providers who are getting chewed up in a system that’s very unforgiving.”

Doctors make better treatment decisions when they’re more confident of a diagnosis, Spencer said.

In an experiment, researchers asked doctors to view videos of actors pretending to be patients with heart disease or depression, make a diagnosis, and recommend follow-up actions. Doctors felt far more certain diagnosing white men than Black patients or younger women.

“If they were less certain, they were less likely to take action, such as ordering tests,” Spencer said. “If they were less certain, they might just wait to prescribe treatment.”

It’s easy to see why doctors are more confident when diagnosing white men, Spencer said. For more than a century, medical textbooks have illustrated diseases with stereotypical images of white men. Only 4.5% of images in general medical textbooks feature patients with dark skin.

That may help explain why patients with darker complexions are less likely to receive a timely diagnosis with conditions that affect the skin, from cancer to Lyme disease, which causes a red or pink rash in the earliest stage of infection. Black patients with Lyme disease are more likely to be diagnosed with more advanced disease, which can cause arthritis and damage the heart. Black people with melanoma are about three times as likely as whites to die within five years.

The covid-19 pandemic helped raise awareness that pulse oximeters — the fingertip devices used to measure a patient’s pulse and oxygen levels — are less accurate for people with dark skin. The devices work by shining light through the skin; their failures have delayed critical care for many Black patients.

it is january 16 and stalin saved the world from fascism

K-pop stars criticized for drinking coffee from 'pro-Israel' Starbucks

Korean artists have received criticism for using products from Starbucks as fans call for boycotts of the franchise regarding the company's alleged stance on the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.

Enhypen’s Jake was criticized for drinking the company's product during a Jan. 5 live show on Weverse. Fans complained in the livestream's chat, telling him “not to buy and consume drinks from Starbucks.”

“I made a mistake, I’m very sorry, won’t happen again,” the singer said on Weverse in reply to one such comment.

Singer Jeon Somi was also criticized for using a tumbler with a Starbucks logo in a makeup video uploaded to TikTok last month. The clip has since been taken down following the backlash.

An Instagram post depicting Blackpink member Jisoo holding a Starbucks tumbler, which was uploaded last July, has also received a number of critical comments, with users demanding that she boycott Starbucks.

Starbucks received backlash last October when it sued its workers' union, Starbucks Workers United, after a member of the union tweeted a pro-Palestinian message. Online critics interpreted Starbucks' action as indicating support for Israel, though the company has denied that claim.

Starbucks Korea is owned by Shinsegae Group and operated separately from the U.S.-based Starbucks.

But it pays royalties to the US Starbucks as the article fails to mention.

BDS is alive and thriving in... k-pop?

does anyone have the latest details on the south african court case against israel? ideally in like a relatively "reputable" source but i'll take whatever