Sure, but the bigger issue, as noted from the quotes in my comment, is how can the IMF even do a real evaluation when Russia is almost certainly lying about its economic and trade figures? If the IMF does try to make a statement taking a definitive stance on Russia’s current economy, then we’ll all know the IMF is agreeing to push Russia’s bullshit.

“What recommendations does the IMF want to give Russia at the end of the consultation? How to better run a war economy?” one senior eurozone official told Reuters.

Tim Ash, a Russia analyst at the foreign affairs thinktank Chatham House, said in a blogpost: “Clearly while article IV reviews are about surveillance they are also about providing policy advice to countries as to where they are going wrong and trying to provide advice as how to improve their economic outturns.

“Inevitably therefore IMF officials, in making the trip to Moscow, will be helping Russia improve its economy and by so doing will be leaving themselves open to being accused of helping Russia in the conduct of the war against Ukraine.”

Robin Brooks, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said: “A basic requirement for IMF membership is data transparency, which Russia clearly no longer satisfies on a number of fronts.

“Russia has stopped publishing lots of data and there are questions around whether the data it continues to publish are accurate.”

Brooks said the Kremlin was publishing trade figures that showed low income from oil produced in the Urals, even though the price of Russian oil has remained “quite elevated”. It meant the current account, which measures the net effect of trade and financial flows, would disguise the size of Russia’s war chest.

“Russia should be suspended from the IMF while these data questions persist,” he said.

I didn’t know the courts could just say “no strike”. Aren’t most strikes by definition going against the rules?

Expect this thread to get deleted by the mods, since mine of the same link was deleted just a moment ago. No reason given, but given past history, I presume it’s because it’s not a “mainstream” enough news source for the mods.

West Bank wasn’t an “active war zone” until Israel invaded it the other day. Prior to this, it was just a bunch of Israeli illegal aliens trying to take over the land and attacking the Palestinian civilians living there.

They’re seriously trying to claim that none of the drones actually hit anything and all of the damage we’re seeing (the rather extensive damage) is all just “debris” from them downing the drones.

Sure, Jan, sure.

Israel has described the operation as a strategy to prevent attacks on Israeli civilians, which since the start of the war have increased in the West Bank, including near settlements that the international community largely considers illegal. In return, the Palestinian Health Ministry noted a surge in Palestinian deaths by Israeli forces, with 663 killed in the West Bank in the nearly 11 months since the war began.

In central Gaza, Israeli airstrikes hit a multi-story building housing displaced people in and around Nuseirat, a built-up refugee camp in central Gaza, further south in Khan Younis and northward in Gaza City, officials at hospitals in the three areas said on Saturday morning.

Among the dead were a physician and his family and a child whose right leg had been previously amputated, according to an initial list of casualties from the hospital and footage released on Saturday by civil defense officials who operated under Gaza’s Hamas-run government.

So even Israel’s claimed reason for the attack on West Bank is because of Palestinians defending and retaliating against violent illegals in their country?

The “group of individuals” was the local movement company. They were assisting getting to the destination and there was no evidence that they made any hostile actions. That’s what ANERA says in this article even. So they didn’t admit to any of the made up nonsense that IDF or this Times of Israel article is claiming.

So, they’re not even trying to hide their actions at this point. Doing this in West Bank shows the goal is indeed the ethnic cleansing of the population and forcing them out so the land can be taken. We already know that has been the prerogative for decades, but this is a pretty blatant example.

Haaretz is the only real source of coverage of such opposing voices. And the Israeli government has already been trying to make moves to have them be shut down for daring to not support the will of the government.

There’s definitely people protesting in Israel and have been since the start. But it is indeed unclear on whether they’re protesting regarding their government’s actions in Gaza or just protesting against Netanyahu more generally (which they had also been doing prior to all this anyways).

I honestly feel like if the national powers at the time had been actually serious about the Jewish people deserving a homeland after the horrors of the Holocaust, then Israel should have been created out of a portion of western Germany.

That combined with the “Killology” guy really explains how worthless and barbaric the entire US police system is.

Please, please let them all ship themselves to Siberia.

So, criticizing you for raping a child is “bullying” you? I don’t think the claimed rehabilitation happened. He should still be in jail.

Removed by mod

While touring the hospital we walked through one of the ICUs and found multiple preteens admitted with gunshot wounds to the head. One might argue that a child could have been injured unintentionally in an explosion, or perhaps even forgotten when Israel invaded a children’s hospital and reportedly left infants to die in a pediatric intensive care unit.

Gunshot wounds to the head are an entirely different matter.

We started seeing a series of children, preteens mostly, who’d been shot in the head. They’d go on to slowly die, only to be replaced by new victims who’d also been shot in the head, and who would also go on to slowly die. Their families told us one of two stories: the children were playing inside when they were shot by Israeli forces, or they were playing in the street when they were shot by Israeli forces.

(The Israel Defense Forces did not respond to specific questions for this story, but in an emailed statement, it said, “The IDF is committed to mitigating civilian harm during operational activity. In that spirit, the IDF makes great efforts to estimate and consider potential civilian collateral damage in its strikes.”)

At the hospital, a baby in a pink shirt, her face covered with sand, cried while receiving first aid. A small boy lay motionless at the other end of the bed, one shoe gone. Many wounded were treated on the floor.

There was “the overwhelming stench of blood,” said Louise Wateridge, a spokesperson with the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees who visited the hospital and spoke with several patients. Staff said there were no cleaning products left.

The blast threw a 2-year-old child into the air and the mother was missing, Wateridge said. Another boy had his feet blown off, while an 8-year-old boy was killed. “They told me to go there to be safe,” his grieving mother told her of the area struck.

https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-war-news-07-13-2024-83bc4de7ed25b317c7871fd5c0999ad1?taid=66925a563162580001097238&utm_campaign=TrueAnthem&utm_medium=AP&utm_source=Twitter

The fact that this isn’t The Onion is just bizarre. I constantly feel like this SMBC comic has to be accurate.

"Earshot found that with the minimum registered interval of 24 milliseconds, this tank would have to have been positioned just 13 metres away from the car. With the maximum interval of 40 milliseconds, the tank would have still been only 23 metres away from the car. This analysis suggests that the tank had to be positioned within close range (13–23 metres) of the car when it fired the shots that killed Layan. At such proximity, it is not plausible that the shooter could not have seen that the car was occupied by civilians, including children.

Earshot’s audio ballistic analysis supports the final words of Layan Hamada: the gunfire came from a tank that was next to them."

"Comparing the exit hole and varying levels of destruction helps reconstruct the cone of impact from the explosion, and in turn, reveals the direction from which the ambulance was shot (Figure 13). This direction is consistent with the location of Israeli tanks visible in satellite imagery from between 29 January and 8 February.

Our assessment of the position of the tanks at the time of the attack, together with the direction of the shot, suggests that the ambulance was likely hit by ammunition from an Israeli tank."