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Cake day: June 7th, 2024

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  • “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.













  • 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?









  • 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.”)





  • "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."