Tag: slavery

Liberal Actress Angelina Jolie Makes Unannounced Visit to Ukraine, and Watches Her Bodyguard Get Instantly Mobilized for the Front

Did she bail out the bodyguard or was he sent to the front?

When Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie decided to make a unannounced visit to war-torn Ukraine, she didn’t imagine that she would witness first-hand a grave problem in its society: the prospect of immediate – and forceful – mobilization for combat.

Rumors have swirled online that Jolie had been paid $20 million by USAID for her first visit – but no corroboration was ever found.

During her first visit in 2022 to Lvov in western Ukraine, the air raid sirens sounded, making for an interesting photo op for the star.

Her second visit, this time to frontline areas in Kherson, was also no without some drama, as her surprise appearance was nearly spoiled by military recruiters, who grabbed her bodyguard (or driver, or ‘guide’) and questioned him why he had not enlisted for the army.

The Telegraph reported:

“The Hollywood actress ventured to the southern cities of Mykolaiv and Kherson on her latest humanitarian mission to the war-torn country, meeting volunteers and medics forced to live underground to escape attacks from Russian troops.

But the unannounced visit nearly descended into chaos after a member of her entourage, believed to be a driver, drew the attention of military recruiters at a checkpoint a few hours north of their first stop in Mykolaiv.”

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Ukraine’s ‘Busification’ — forced conscription — is tip of the iceberg

“Busification” is a well-understood term in Ukraine and refers to the process in which young men are detained against their will, often involving a violent struggle, and bundled into a vehicle — often a minibus — for onward transit to an army recruitment center.

Until recently, Ukraine’s army recruiters picked easy targets. Yet, on October 26, the British Sun newspaper’s defense editor, Jerome Starkey, wrote a harrowing report about a recent trip to the front line in Ukraine, during which he claimed his Ukrainian colleague was “forcibly press-ganged into his country’s armed services.”

This case was striking for two reasons; first, that the forced mobilization of troops is rarely reported by Western mainstream media outlets. And second, that unlike most forced conscriptions, this event took place following the alleged commandeering of the Western journalists’ vehicle by three armed men, who insisted they drive to a recruitment center.

There, Starkey reported, “I saw at least [a] dozen glum men — mostly in their 40s and 50s — clutching sheafs of papers. They were called in and out of side rooms for rubber-stamp medicals to prove they were fit to fight.”

The process has drawn criticism after high-profile incidents where men have died even before they donned military uniforms. On October 23, Ukrainian Roman Sopin died from heavy blunt trauma to the head after he had been forcibly recruited. Ukrainian authorities claim that he fell, but his family is taking legal action. In August, a conscripted man, 36, died suddenly at a recruitment center in Rivne, although the authorities claim he died of natural causes. In June, 45-year-old Ukrainian-Hungarian Jozsef Sebestyen died after he was beaten with iron bars following his forced conscription; the Ukrainian military denies this version of events. In August, a conscript died from injuries sustained after he jumped out of a moving vehicle that was transporting him to the recruitment center.

Look online and you’ll find a trove of thousands of incidents, with most of them filmed this year alone. You can find videos of a recruitment officer chasing a man and shooting at him, a man being choked to death on the street with a recruiter’s knee on his neck. Many include family members or friends fighting desperately to prevent their loved one being taken against his will.

If videos of this nature, on this systemic scale, were shared in the United States or the United Kingdom, I believe that members of the public would express serious concerns. Yet the Western media remains largely silent, and I find it difficult to understand why.

In November 2024, Ukraine’s defense minister Rustem Umerov claimed that he would put an end to busification. It is true that Ukraine has been taking steps to modernize its army recruitment and make enlistment more appealing to men under the age of 25. Yet, there is little evidence that those efforts are having the desired effect. And after a year, busification only appears to be getting worse, yet remains widely ignored by the Western press.

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Shocking scenes as huge crowds of ultra-Orthodox Israelis protesting against military conscription throw bottles at female reporter before boy, 15, falls to his death during demonstration

A massive rally of ultra-Orthodox Jewish Israelis protesting against military conscription today turned violent as the crowd threw bottles at a female reporter and a teenage boy fell to his death. 

A packed crowd of an estimated 200,000 people, mostly men, clogged the roads around the Route 1 highway leading into Jerusalem today. 

Photos showed many had climbed atop roofs of buildings, a gas station and onto cranes.  

Video footage showed the agitated crowd stalking a female reporter from Israeli news outlet V1 who was covering the event before chucking glass bottles at her.  

Crowds of men set fire to pieces of tarpaulin as hundreds of police officers cordoned off several roads across the city. 

Demonstrators packed onto the tops of buildings, petrol stations, bridges and balconies above a sea of fellow protesters, some of whom held signs declaring: ‘Better to go to prison than to the army.’

A helicopter flew overhead as people gathered to take part in collective prayers. 

The Israeli ambulance service said a 15-year-old fell to his death and police said they had opened an investigation into the incident.

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NATO state brings back military draft

Croatia’s parliament has voted to reinstate compulsory military service, ending a 17-year hiatus. The Balkan country abolished the draft in 2008, shifting to a fully professional army.

The move comes amid a broader trend among NATO and EU members of reviving conscription and boosting military budgets, citing current geopolitical tensions, particularly the Ukraine conflict.

Under the new law, around 4,000 recruits will be called up each year in five groups for two months of basic training at military facilities across Croatia, state broadcaster HRT reported on Friday. The program – estimated to cost €23.7 million annually – will begin in early 2026. Participants will receive around €1,100 per month, plus travel and leave expenses, and credited work experience.

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Thousands of Orthodox Jews rally in New York to protest change in Israel’s military draft rules

Thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews packed the streets and sidewalks for blocks around the Israeli consulate in New York City on Sunday to protest issues including a potential end of an exemption for religious students from compulsory service in Israel’s military.

The protest at the consulate, a block from the United Nations campus in Manhattan, illustrated the complex relationship between Israel and segments of the large population of very religious Jews in New York and its suburbs.

The two influential, and often rival, grand rebbes of the Satmar community both called on adherents to participate in the demonstration. The Central Rabbinical Congress of the U.S.A. and Canada, a consortium of Orthodox Jewish groups, said it helped organize the protest.

It comes after Israel’s Supreme Court last year ordered the government to begin drafting ultra-Orthodox Jewish men into the military. There had been a longstanding enlistment exemption – dating to the founding of Israel in 1948.

The ultra-Orthodox worry that mandatory enlistment will impact adherents’ ties to their faith. But many Jewish Israelis have argued that an exemption is unfair. Rifts over the issue have deepened since the start of the war in Gaza.

Rabbi Moishe Indig, a Satmar community leader, said he’s not sure organizers expected so many people to show up but he said he felt urgency building around the issue.

He said he was appreciative of the governments in New York and the U.S. “for giving us the freedom and liberty to be able to live free and have our children go to school and study and learn the Torah.”

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Future of Selective Service Goes to House-Senate Conference – Again

Following approval by the House and Senate of different versions of an annual military policy bill, the future of the Selective Service System (SSS) will be decided behind closed doors by a House-Senate conference committee  –  for the sixth time in the last ten years.

When the Federal government shut down most agencies and activities at the start of October 2025, the SSS stayed in operation and continued to register young men for a possible military draft. Maintaining a fiction of readiness to activate military conscription is apparently considered “essential” to enabling planning for war without limits. And even during the “shutdown”, Congress has taken time out of its budget debates to act on legislation to plan and prepare for war. But major proposed changes to Selective Service laws, regulations, and procedures remain undecided.

By the end of this year, we could see the most significant changes in Selective Service law, regulations, and procedures since 1980. Or pending decisions might be postponed, continuing the current decades-old stalemate between massive noncompliance with the registration and address reporting requirements and Congressional reluctance to admit the failure of the program and repeal the Military Selective Service Act (MSSA).

Here’s what’s in the works:

(1) Changes in Selective Service law

A dangerous and unworkable proposal to have the SSS attempt to register all potential draftees “automatically” using other Federal databases was approved by the full House of Representatives as part of this year’s annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This year’s NDAA still has its traditional “Defense” title. But we can’t help wondering whether, if Congress renames the “Department of Defense” the “Department of War”, as President Trump has proposed, next year’s version of this bill will be titled the “War Authorization Act”.

The proposal for “automatic” draft registration in the House version of the NDAA would give the SSS unprecedented authority to obtain and aggregate any information from any other Federal agency or from potential draftees that the SSS believes might help the agency identify or locate potential draftees. Because whether an individual is required to register, under the current interpretation of the MSSA by the SSS, depends on both sex as assigned at birth and immigration and visa status, the SSS would be authorized and required to collect information held by other Federal agencies for other purposes and interrogate young people to try to create a master database of every young adult in the USA including their sex as assigned at birth, their immigration and visa status, and their current address.

Activists for peace and freedom need to sound the alarm now: The power to collect and aggregate personal information from any and all other Federal agencies that would be given to the SSS by the proposal for automatic draft registration would be unprecedented for any Federal agency, and would have unprecedented potential for weaponization and abuse, especially against immigrant and transgender young adults. Members of Congress should care about, and should oppose, this proposal, even if they aren’t worried about a military draft.

The Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has already gained access to the SSS registration database. There’s no telling what damage DOGE would do with the additional data the SSS would be authorized and required to compile in order to try to register potential draftees “automatically”.

The House version of the NDAA for Fiscal Year 2026 including the provision for “automatic” Selective Service registration was approved by the full House on 10 September 2025 and finally forwarded to the Senate, after clerical corrections, on 30 September 2025, just before the Federal government partially shut down. A bipartisan amendment to replace the provision for “automatic” draft registration with a provision to repeal the MSSA was introduced in the House, but the House Rules Committee chose not to allow a floor vote on this amendment.

No comparable proposal for automatic registration or expansion of SSS data-gathering authority is included in the version of this year’s NDAA approved by the Senate on 10 October 2025. The fate of the House provision for “automatic” Selective Service registration will be decided during closed-door House-Senate conference negotiations on the NDAA, the outcome of which probably won’t be known until much later in the year.

(2) Changes in Selective Service regulations

During the Biden Administration, the SSS conducted its first comprehensive review in decades of the regulations spelling out its contingency plans for a draft, if Congress were to authorize a draft without at the same time making any other changes to the MSSA. The SSS planned to publish a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) for its revised regulations in early 2025. But this update to SSS regulations has been held back indefinitely by President Trump’s ongoing freeze on promulgation of new Federal regulations. Little is known concerning the content of the planned revisions to the regulations.

(3) Changes to draft boards

Lists of draft board members and draft board jurisdictions by county released in February and March of 2025 in response to one of my Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests revealed that many local and appeal boards lack a quorum and/or lack a member from each county over which they have jurisdiction. As a result, they would lack authority to adjudicate claims for deferment, exemption, or classification and assignment to noncombatant or alternative service as a conscientious objector in the event of a draft.

Within weeks after I reported on the implications of these draft board vacancies for SSS (un)readiness to actually carry out an on-demand draft, the SSS quietly replaced the application for draft board membership on its Web site with a statement that, “The Selective Service System is currently reviewing the structure and operations of the Board Member Program. As part of this reassessment, we are temporarily pausing the acceptance of new volunteer applications.”

No further information has been released concerning the reasons for the “pause” or what the SSS plans to do about draft board vacancies. The mandate for appointment of draft boards and the entitlement of draftees to have claims heard by local boards and to appeal administrative denials to state and national appeal boards remain part of the MSSA and the SSS regulations, so the SSS couldn’t carry out a draft without filling these vacancies. Current board members continue to serve until their terms expire or they resign or die, but the number of boards that lack a quorum and would be unable to function in the event of a draft will grow with attrition as long as no new board members are being appointed.

It’s unclear whether decisions will be made this year on any of these issues or if these proposals will merely be carried over to, or reintroduced, next year. But these issues won’t go away until Congress acts, and Congress won’t act unless and until it feels public pressure, whether from lobbying or from direct action such as continued passive but massive noncompliance with the draft registration law.

There’s growing recognition that current SSS contingency plans for a draft, especially the registration program, are a paper tiger that won’t stand up to even cursory critical scrutiny. Sooner or later, something has to change. The direction of that change depends on what we do now and in the months and perhaps years ahead to organize and resist ongoing planning and preparation for military conscription that makes larger wars and military adventurism more likely.

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Want Slavery Reparations? Go Ask Muslim Countries, Says Scholar

It’s arguable that the people who complain about slavery most actually may love it, in a perverse way. After all, it provides so many with excuses for failure, anti-Western talking points, and opportunities to extract hand-outs. Just consider “reparations,” which are now continually demanded (by people enslaved only by their own indoctrination). Why, California Governor Gavin Newsom, panderer-in-chief, just signed a bill Friday to create a reparations-administration agency. Never mind that California was never a slave state.

But to African-descent people who want reparations, a British-Bangladeshi scholar has a message: You’re barking up the wrong tree.

You need to seek your booty elsewhere — from Muslim countries.

Dr. Rakib Ehsan, a commentator and author of the book Beyond Grievance, mentions the Ottoman Empire in particular. Now the nation of Turkey, chattel slavery was a major part of its economy and society for more than six centuries, Ehsan points out. He elaborates at The Telegraph:

Millions were enslaved — including Slavs, Eastern Europeans, Africans, and people in the western Mediterranean.

The Ottoman Empire captured and utilised “white slaves” — primarily European Christians — through various methods such as raids into European territories and the Black Sea slave trade originating from the Balkans and Caucasus.

Under the “Devshirme” system, Christian boys were conscripted and forced to convert to Islam, trained to serve as slave soldiers (the Janissaries). The gradual rolling back of Ottoman imperial slavery was ultimately the result of Western pressure.

Note here that white slavery, in a de facto sense, wasn’t unknown in the early United States, either. According to the 2007 book White Cargo, in fact, more than 300,000 white de facto slaves were sent from Europe to the United States over two centuries. And among some groups within this number, the mortality rate was 25-50 percent.

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Gavin Newsom approves slavery reparations agency

Gavin Newsom on Friday approved a new state agency to administer restitution for descendants of slaves — a victory for Black lawmakers and advocates despite stopping short of providing cash reparations.

The Democratic governor signed the legislation, SB 518, five years after forming a task force in the wake of George Floyd’s murder to study the legacy of slavery in California and how the state could implement reparations policies — and more than two years after the panel released its extensive recommendations.

Newsom mentioned the bill during a conversation about racism on the podcast “Higher Learning with Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay.”

“I signed a bill two days ago with the Black Caucus as it relates to creating a new office to address these systemic issues,” he said during an episode released Friday morning.

Pushing reparations proposals across the finish line has proved challenging — especially as the post-pandemic political climate shifted rightward and the state confronted multibillion-dollar budget deficits. Newsom himself threw cold water on the notion of writing checks to descendants of slaves when he said in 2023, “Dealing with the legacy of slavery is about much more than cash payments.”

Last year, late amendments sought by Newsom, combined with caucus in-fighting, sank the effort to stand up a new reparations agency. The governor later vetoed a bill that would have provided redress for victims of racially-motivated eminent domain, noting the state lacked an agency to administer the program.

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Ukrainians told to stop sharing violent conscription videos

Ukraine’s conscription authorities have called on citizens to refrain from documenting cases of violent forced military enlistment, instead urging the population to “cherish” recruitment officers. 

The message, shared on Wednesday by the Kiev Regional Territorial Center for Recruitment and Social Support (TCK), condemned a Telegram channel called Stop TCK Ukraine, which has been circulating videos of men being violently detained and forced into enlistment vehicles – incidents popularly dubbed “busifications” that often go viral.

The center alleged the channel was part of Russian information warfare and told Ukrainians to “never (!) watch videos of ‘busification.’”

“For God’s sake, don’t film or share such videos,” the post read. “If the Russians turn you into sheep, they’ll slaughter you like pigs tomorrow. So cherish the TCKs, help the TCKs, assist and protect them. They are the only ones filling the ranks of frontline units.”

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Dozens of victims discovered inside Tampa mansion linked to church forced labor scheme

According to newly released court documents, 57 people, including minors, were forced to live and work under harsh conditions, reportedly enduring food and sleep deprivation, threats, and physical abuse.

Despite their lavish setting, victims were discovered to have been made to sleep on floors, kept in a garage, or crammed into rooms with limited access to bathrooms.

The indictment alleges that Michelle Brannon and fellow Kingdom of God Global Church leader David Taylor manipulated followers into working 24-hour shifts in church call centers. The workers were not paid and pressured into relentlessly soliciting donations that generated about $50 million over the last decade.

What they’re saying

One former church employee described the environment as mentally and physically abusive, citing public humiliation and isolation from family and friends.

“I did see David Taylor get aggressive with the staff,” said Leslie Portillo, who lived at the church’s Detroit ministry for several months.

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