Image is of the Cuban flag and the Pride flag on the Havana Health Ministry building.
Inspired by a highly upvoted recommendation by @Commiejones@hexbear.net:
We need to kill the Mega Posting Wars meme. It wasn't very funny to start with and now I get the feeling some people are taking it way too seriously. Clogging up the news thread with bullshit just to try to out post the trans mega is just dumb and annoying.
The News Megathread is now under trans martial law:
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Loving trans people on this site and elsewhere is strictly mandatory.
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Posting about the "comment wars" between the trans and news megathreads is now strongly discouraged inside the news megathread. No shame in it - I also recently made jokes about it - but though they were almost always just jokes, it was unrelated to current events and was beginning to feel more like padding the comment count instead of trying to improve the quality of the thread. If you want to boost comments and engagement here, then post articles and analysis!
The COTW (Chemical of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific chemical every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied chemicals. If you've wanted to talk about the chemical or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
The Chemicals of the Week are Estrogen and Testosterone! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
https://archive.ph/jELdo
There it is. And still they still try to blame the pilot. It wouldn't have been nearly as bad if they just acknowledged up-front that the plane got shot down by Russia. Instead they put out like five different stories first...
From the tone of the article, it sounds like it was from shrapnel or avoiding action as a result of a Russian cruise missile being shot down in close proximity, rather than Russia directly shooting down the F-16. This has happened before to Ukrainian pilots.
Anti-air missiles use proximity fuses and take out aircraft with shrapnel and shockwave. It’s way easier than trying to get a direct hit, and just as effective. So, saying the plane was killed by shrapnel doesn’t preclude it from being a Russian anti-air kill.
Yea this is like saying frag grenades don't kill the soldier just got really sleepy after being hit by scraps of metal after a grenade thrown by the enemy spontaneously disassembled in his general vicinity.
Of course, my comment is more on the tone of the article and the fact that the F-16s were suspected to be operating far away from the frontlines, so a direct shoot down sounds unlikely to me.
That's a possibility, but it's also very likely that Russia was expecting F-16s in the sky attempting to shoot down the cruise missiles, and therefore had air defense or fighter jets prepared to shoot them down.
The main problem is how far away from the frontlines the F-16s were suspected to be operating from. This makes a SAM kill basically impossible, Russia would've had to sneak a full air defence system hundreds of kilometres into Ukraine beyond the frontline to achieve such. That means that the only possibility would be an air to air kill, and while Russia has long range air to air R-37 missiles with a maximum range of over 320km/200 miles in testing, this would still require Russian fighter jets to fly deep into Ukraine's territory without being detected or shot down to achieve such a kill. Realistically the only jet that could do that is the Su-57 with its stealth capabilities, however Russia only has a handful of these planes and uses them in very limited roles. A risky mission well into enemy territory to bag a kill on an F-16 sounds unlikely to me, especially since if such happened I'd expect it to be all over Russian media.
That could be why the air force commander was fired. The F-16s could have been operating in a risky area.
I actually read an interesting theory on that. Zelensky has a propagandist that he uses to set the official narrative in Ukraine. This propagandist made up the story about the F-16 being shot down in a friendly fire incident by a patriot missile. The head of the air force called out this fake story. Thus, he had to be fired by Zelensky.
Russia shot a fighter jet down over Kiev from over 200 km away with an S300 at the start of the war
https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/russia-sets-world-record-lands-first-aa-kill-at-range-of-217
Yes that's the record SAM kill. But 200km is not enough range to strike fighters in Western Ukraine, where the F-16s were suspected to be operating at. You'd need 600+km of range to do that.
I heard the only anti-air happening in Ukraine right now was in Kiev and Kursk. Where was this F16 downed? I'm willing to bet it was around Kiev, which can be hit from Belgorod region.
With the widespread Russian missile attacks that have been hitting as far west as Lviv, I'd doubt that. The F-16 was reportedly downed during one of these attacks. The F-16s are suspected to be based out of Ivano-Frankivsk, based on geolocation of Ukrainian propaganda videos. RIA Novosti also reported that Russia hit a hangar there where they suspected the F-16s were stored.
Yea those widespread attacks have met no resistance whatsoever except in Kiev. Reports are that Russian drones and missiles elsewhere are completely unhindered