The Israeli Army has announced the death of an Islamic Jihad leader during a bombardment at dawn on Thursday in the city of Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip, as part of the 'Arrow and Shield' operation, which has already killed several members of the armed group in recent days.

As confirmed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), the attack has ended the life of Ali Ghali, whom it accuses of being behind the launch of the recent projectiles from the Strip.. Two other men have also died, according to the IDF also members of Islamic Jihad, who were at the home at the time.

The Palestinian agency Wafa had previously reported three citizens killed in the attack, where according to the media there are also several injured, some seriously.. The Palestinian Interior Ministry has confirmed that emergency services are on the scene to treat the injured.

In addition, the agency has reported that other attacks have hit an uninhabited house in Bani Suheila, on the outskirts of Khan Yunis, and an empty piece of land between the two towns.

The North American Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, has assured this Wednesday that the negotiations with Spain to proceed with an additional cleaning of the lands that were contaminated by the accident in Palomares (Almería) in 1966 “will resume soon”, without offering deadlines.

This question has been one of those that he has addressed with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, in the meeting that both have held in Washington and that has served as preparation for the meeting this Friday at the White House between the president of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, and the US president, Joe Biden.

Blinken has recognized the “importance” of this issue and has recalled that the United States has already carried out cleanup work in the area affected by the four thermonuclear bombs dropped by one of the two US planes that collided on this Almería district almost six years ago. decades.

Thus, he has announced that “negotiations to carry out additional cleaning efforts will resume soon”, although he has not specified when, while at the same time he has assured the willingness of the United States to address this issue with Spain.

For his part, Albares has valued precisely the willingness of both parties to dialogue to solve a long-standing problem such as the contamination of Palomares. The minister stressed that it is “a complex issue” and that “technical issues” still need to be resolved before a final decision can be made.

The technical aspects, he has defended, “should be discussed at a technical level” and not a political one, and once this happens, the phases can be established to proceed with the cleanup of the contaminated land and the transfer of these lands to the United States, he has pointed out, without want to clarify if this could happen before the end of this year.

The question of Palomares will be one of those that Sánchez and Biden will address this Friday, according to Moncloa, who has not wanted to launch the bells on a possible agreement as a result of the appointment either.. However, government sources have acknowledged that there has been progress in recent months and have trusted that the two presidents can give a “push” to the matter.

The declaration of intent of 2015

The Government sent last March, through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a formal request to the Biden Administration to proceed with the removal of the contaminated land in accordance with a declaration of intent reached in 2015 with Mariano Rajoy in Moncloa and Barack Obama in the White House.

In October 2015, the then Secretary of State, John Kerry, and the Foreign Minister, José Manuel García-Margallo, signed a declaration of intent in Madrid in which both countries committed to a “major rehabilitation” of the area around Palomares. and to undertake the transfer of contaminated soil to a “proper location” in the United States.

Despite this agreement, in these years there has been no progress, which led the current government to resume it and formally ask Washington to comply with what was agreed at that time.. Although Blinken has expressed the willingness of the United States to address the matter, it remains to be seen if it will be done in accordance with what was already agreed upon at the time.

In that document, Spain expressed its desire for “greater rehabilitation of the Palomares environment” while the United States expressed its desire to “provide the necessary assistance to achieve this objective.”. To do this, both governments had to “negotiate a binding agreement to establish a cooperative effort” for said rehabilitation and agreed to “the deposit of contaminated land in a suitable location in the United States.”

New York Republican congressman George Santos, famous for the web of falsehoods he concocted to be elected, has pleaded not guilty to the alleged crimes for which he was arrested this Wednesday and released on half a million dollar bail .

Santos has appeared before a federal judge after being charged with alleged fraud, money laundering, theft of public funds and false testimony, with a total of thirteen charges against him. Amid great expectation, the legislator has pleaded not guilty to all these accusations, according to media present at the court in the town of Central Islip (New York) where the session took place.

Santos has been released on probation on $500,000 bail guaranteed by three anonymous people, and the judge, Anne Y.. Shields, has decreed that their movements should be limited to New York, Washington, and places in between. To travel to other points, the 34-year-old congressman must receive prior approval, as decided by the judge.

Leaving the court shouting “liar”, Santos has made it clear that he does not intend to give up his seat in Congress, something that the Republican Party has not asked him to do so far, and has added that he even intends to run for re-election in next year's elections.

In fact, he has thanked the Republican Party for “being patient”, in reference to the words of his leaders in Washington that they would not pressure him to leave the seat.. The congressman even had time to tweet a brief message: “Witch hunt”. It is the same expression used by former President Donald Trump – of whom Santos declares himself an admirer – to refer to the legal cases opened against him.

As usual with Republicans, he has alluded to alleged crimes committed by those close to US President Joe Biden, and has complained that, unlike his case, they go unpunished, adding that he will provide evidence that the accusations against him are without foundation.

If found guilty, Santos faces up to twenty years in prison for the most serious charges.

“Aggressively eradicate corruption”

The Department of Justice has designated him this Wednesday as a suspect of “embezzling donations from his supporters, fraudulently obtaining unemployment benefits and lying to the House of Representatives.”

United States Attorney Breon Peace, of the Eastern District of New York, has affirmed that, with his indictment this Wednesday, he intends to “aggressively eradicate corruption and self-deception from public institutions, as well as hold public officials accountable to constituencies that they chose them.”

Peace has referred to (Santos's) “persistent dishonesty and deceit in order to ascend the halls of Congress and enrich themselves.”. “He used political donations to line his pockets,” he said graphically, before recalling that he also benefited from unemployment funds “that should have gone to New Yorkers who lost their jobs in the pandemic.”

More directly criminal conduct

Shortly after Santos's election last year, The New York Times was the first to reveal the entire network of falsehoods that adorned his false resume, relating to his family, his religion, his studies or his hobbies, and the Santos himself went so far as to admit that he had “embellished” some of those details.

Media scrutiny thereafter, however, revealed more directly criminal conduct related to the use of the money, and while the local chapter of the Republican Party solemnly distanced itself from Santos, in Washington the party has been much less strict and it has not prevented him from continuing in the seat.

As in the days of the Roman Empire, the Soviet generals deposited at the feet of their supreme commander, Joseph Stalin, the Nazi banners captured on the battlefield. 40,000 soldiers of the victorious army marched through Red Square in the company of 1,850 war vehicles. Marshals Zhukov and Rokossovsky greeted the people from their magnificent horses, which trotted to the sound of military hymns performed by more than 1,300 musicians present in the largest military parade in history.

78 years later, the heirs of that regime, mired in a much more limited war of their own choosing, canceled the traditional parade of the so-called Immortal Regiment and reduced pomp and circumstance to a minimum.. The Victory Day marches have been canceled in 20 Russian cities, but 10,000 soldiers and a hundred vehicles have circulated in Moscow's Red Square, as previously announced by the Defense Minister.. A single tank has paraded through Red Square, an old Soviet-made T-34, without any modern main battle tanks, presumably deployed in Ukraine.. Unlike on Victory Day last year, the influx of onlookers has been much smaller, and the area had been closed to pedestrians for weeks, at the risk of a mysterious drone attack on one of the Kremlin domes, which the Government of Russia blames the Ukrainians and the Americans.

What was a day of union between Russia and its neighboring nations has become a poisoned day. Russia as the beginning of peace in Europe with its victory over the Nazis in the face of a Russia “attacked by the entire West”. In his 10-minute speech on May 9 in Red Square, Vladimir Putin insisted that a “real war” has been unleashed against Russia.. “We resist international terrorism and we will also defend the people of Donbas and guarantee our security,” he said.. The Russian president stated, in line with previous statements, that Western countries are sowing hatred and Russophobia. “Any supremacist ideology is criminal,” he asserted..

The Russian leader stressed that “there is nothing more important” than the work of the soldiers at the front to guarantee the security of Russia, to later initiate a minute of silence for the fallen soldiers.. “There is no stronger cause in the world than our love for our armed forces,” Putin said at the end of his speech..

Ukraine celebrates Europe Day

In addition to the concerns related to security after the latest drone attacks, Victory Day, considered the most important festivity of the ruling party, has been losing its luster among neighboring nations for years.. To the point that some of them have officially disassociated themselves from an episode that linked them to Moscow. A reconsideration that precedes the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but which has only accelerated.

Since Monday, by decree of President Volodimir Zelensky, May 9 will be considered Europe Day in Ukraine.. A holiday that, in the European Union, marks the anniversary of the Schuman Declaration: the proposal, in 1950, to place the coal and steel production of France and West Germany under the same authority. The embryo of what would later become the European Union.

“Together, with the rest of free Europe, we will celebrate Europe Day on May 9 in Ukraine,” Zelensky declared.. “A united Europe that must be and will be based on peace. Our Europe, of which Ukraine has always been, is and will be a part”. Victory Day over Nazism is moved to May 8. The same date that Europeans celebrate the unconditional surrender of the Nazis.

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Zelensky's predecessor in office, Petro Poroshenko, had already undertaken the separation of this particular historical Russian liturgy in 2015, when the Ukrainian parliament passed the decommunization laws: a campaign to leave behind the Soviet past, renaming the streets, squares and parks bearing communist names, removing monuments, and, in the case of Victory Day, replacing the Soviet expression Great Patriotic War with the European World War II. And banning the communist symbols that are traditionally displayed in this parade. Zelensky has gone a step further, aligning himself closely with the festive standards of the European Union..

kyiv thus follows in the footsteps of Poland, the Czech Republic or the Baltics, which followed the same path of decommunization, or de-Russification, years before.. The Ukrainian city of Zaporizhia, for example, has just transformed one of its monuments dedicated to the victory against the Nazis: the dates no longer read 1941-1945, but 1939-1945. A way of highlighting the fact that the war did not start with the Nazi invasion of the USSR, but with the division of Poland that Hitler and Stalin practiced, under agreement, in 1939. And the Soviet invasion of Finland that same year.

Parallel to the official distancing from Ukraine, which has technically been at war with Russia since 2014, the government of Vladimir Putin has redoubled the patriotic tone of Victory Day and revised some uncomfortable historical episodes. As Dmitry Shlapentokh, a history professor at Indiana University, points out, the Kremlin has rewritten its role in World War II, justifying the partitioning of Poland and minimizing or erasing proven Soviet crimes..

Despite Russia officially apologizing to Poland for the Katyn massacre in 2010, when Stalinist police summarily executed some 22,000 members of the Polish elite, the Kremlin recently found a way to back down.. His secret police, the FSB, claims to have found evidence that exonerates the Soviets of that massacre and blames the Third Reich.

The myths associated with the war against the Nazis, also very present in the ideological foundation of the Aleksandr Lukashenko regime in Belarus, are one of the pillars of the Putin government, which revived them in the early 2000s. In the 1990s, these myths had been partially dispelled with the end of communism..

As the German historian Karl Schlögel pointed out in these pages, Putin is originally a member of the KGB, a Chekist, and it is in the Cheka that the most recalcitrant imperial sentiment of the Russian Government has always nested.. A feeling represented in the war paraphernalia of Victory Day, and that has spread to other aspects of Russian life, for example, to schools. On May 9, military officers instill patriotism in infants, who often wear uniforms and parade through their towns and cities, with the Saint George ribbon on their chests, as a gesture of support for Russia's military glory..

Critics of the regime parody this “militaristic fetishism”, baptized with the name of pobedobesie, which could be translated as victory-mania. “A manipulation of the legacy of World War II,” according to risk analyst Alex Kokcharov, “to justify aggressive Russian policies and an increase in militarism”.

THREAD.

It’s nearly 9 May, when #Russia is celebrating “Victory Day”. It's time to talk about #Pobedobesie – a militaristic fetishisation of WW2 in Putin's Russia.

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— Alex Kokcharov (@AlexKokcharov) May 8, 2023

The invasion of Ukraine demonstrates, in the context of Russian internal politics, the political usefulness of the construction of this cult. Since the Maidan rebellion in 2014, Russian propaganda portrays Ukraine as a country that would have fallen into the hands of Nazism, risen from its ashes to attack, once again, the Russian people.. A false narrative that has done nothing but grow over the years, sustained by a war review of history. A story that, like the mutual feelings of Russians and Ukrainians, like their cruelty in the trenches and in artillery fights, has also been transferred to the understanding of history..