A new report says governments must continue to make social investments and place focus on marginalized populations.
As many as 30 million people in Latin America, who were recently lifted out of poverty, could go back to being poor, a report from the United Nations Development Programme warned Tuesday.
Thanks to investments in social programs and wealth redistribution policies over the past 15 years, approximately 72 million Latin Americans were lifted out of poverty and a further 94 million moved into the middle class.
However, according to the UNDP, 2015 and 2016 saw a rise in the number of people living in poverty in the region for the first time in decades.
The report, entitled “Multidimensional Progress: Well-Being Beyond Income,” says more than a third of those who left poverty since 2003 are now at risk of becoming poor again.
The UNDP report stressed that the economic slowdown being experienced throughout the region is only one factor.
“Every Latin American generation decides which structural changes to pursue: there are pending citizenship and resilience challenges that will not be solved with economic growth alone,” said George Gray Molina, lead author and UNDP chief economist for Latin America and the Caribbean.
Molina specified that recent achievements were not attributable to free market policies, but rather direct government intervention.
The UNDP is calling on governments to support vulnerable or marginalized groups through social investment and subsidies.
“Right now, on the one hand, we must protect the region’s past achievements, including preventing millions from of people from falling back into poverty; on the other hand, we must also promote inclusive policies and comprehensive strategies for populations suffering from historical discrimination and exclusion,” said United Nations Assistant Secretary-General and UNDP Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean Jessica Faieta.
Left-wing governments, such as Ecuador and Bolivia, have pledged to maintain social investment, despite the downturn in the economy.
However, right-wing governments, such Mauricio Macri’s in Argentina, have pursued policies that have made living more expensive for the poor. According to an April report by the Social Debt Observatory of the Argentine Catholic Church, in only a few months over 2 million Argentines have been pushed into poverty.
The report also suggested that reforms to tax codes to make them more progressive could lessen the burden on low-income people. Governments throughout Latin America largely depend on revenue from resource extraction and value-added taxes, which tend to be regressive.
A 2015 report by the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean called for a reform of tax codes to reduce inequality and improve tax collection on high-income earners.
An industry-dominated “multistakeholder process” convened by the Commerce Department recently produced a set of voluntary privacy “best practices” for commercial drones that are so riddled with exceptions and vague language that companies could engage in all sorts of practices that would violate the public’s privacy expectations, while still claiming to comply with these guidelines.
The idea of the process was to produce a set of voluntary best practices to ensure that commercial drone use protects privacy rights. It was convened at the direction of President Obama in an executive order on drone privacy that he issued in February 2015.
Last month, before the document was finalized, we, along with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Access Now, urged the corporate participants to make a clear commitment to actual best practices, rather than a weak document designed primarily to ensure maximum flexibility in what companies can do with drones. We proposed a set of changes to the document’s language that would have strengthened it enough to allow us to endorse it. Unfortunately, these changes were rejected.
Why won’t Amazon and other industry players in the drone space make a clean commitment to good privacy practices when it comes to drones? To take just one example, I think one thing most Americans would definitely not want to see companies doing with their drones is engaging in persistent and continuous surveillance of people without their consent. Yet this industry-led draft says the best practice is to avoid doing that “in the absence of a compelling need to do otherwise.” A compelling need? What is that? Is Amazon planning to engage in such surveillance with its delivery drones? If not, why wouldn’t it agree to a more straightforward statement? There were a lot of industry players, so I don’t mean to pick on Amazon. Except actually I do, because apparently that company led the meeting negotiations for industry on what turned into the final product.
Perhaps one could dream up scenarios where a company engages in persistent, continuous surveillance of people without their consent, in a way that nobody would find objectionable. I’m not sure what that scenario would look like, but that certainly wouldn’t be a best practice, and the inclusion of such language is far more likely to be abused than to cover such a remote eventuality.
Other areas where we thought the documents language was too weak were around issues such as consent, the collection of data where people have a reasonable expectation of privacy, the sharing of data with third parties, and data retention. We spell out these and other problems in our letter. As it now stands, the document shows more promise as a corporate consciousness-raising document than an assurance that any complying company isn’t doing anything objectionable.
Any company that is operating drones should certainly comply with the practices laid out in this document. But doing so represents the very bare minimum of what companies should do on privacy, not best practices. The NTIA should reject this document, and discussions in the multi-stakeholder process should continue until adequate privacy protections can be included.
Mohsen Abdelmoumen: Can we say that the United States is a sovereign State when we see the historical weight of the Zionist lobby on its policy decision?
Alison Weir: Adherents of political Zionism have influenced U.S. policies for decades and have often played a central role in elections. Despite this, Americans will be able to forge independent policies when enough people become aware of the facts and demand different policies.
You cite the staggering US aid to Israel, either $ 10 million per day or 7,000 times more per capita than other countries. What justifies such help to Israel from the United States?
I personally don’t feel it is rational or justified. It is the result of political lobbying by well-funded organizations and obfuscation by the American media. Most Americans have no idea that our government gives such an enormous amount of money to Israel. For this reason, our organization is placing billboards around the U.S. informing people of this fact.
You are threatened with death, you undergo pressures, because of your commitment to the Palestinian cause. Where are the Western values such as “democracy” and “freedom of speech” in all this?
Zionists have little attachment to principles such as democracy or freedom of speech. However, I believe that the majority of Americans believe in these and are disturbed when they are violated. Again, however, most are unaware of how deeply these principles are being damaged by Israel partisans.
As an intellectual committed to the Palestinian cause, how can you explain that when people like you are disparaged, defamed and threatened, some leaders of the Arab-Muslim world collaborate actively with Israel, including some Palestinians themselves? Is not the Palestinian cause the cause of all the humanity?
A group in Malaysia has a wonderful name: “the Movement for a Just World.” I feel that the Palestinian cause is part of that. All people should work for justice for all people, without exceptions.
You were supported in 2015 by 2000 activists and world-famous personalities, among them the Professor Richard Falk, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied, Hedy Epstein, Ann Wright, Arun Gandhi, Ray McGovern, Cindy Sheehan, and James Abourezk former Senator and founder of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. Can you tell us about this open letter they signed?
Some individuals who say they are “pro-Palestinian” seem to wish to control the discourse on this issue and keep aspects of it, such as the power of the Israel lobby, hidden. A group called “Jewish voice for peace” that was formed about the same time that I began “If Americans Knew” has always contained Zionists among its members and, while its stances have evolved as more people have become involved in the Palestine solidarity movement, it has a history of taking weak stands on some fundamental aspects of this issue and failing to support full justice for Palestinians; it refuses to consider Zionism racist. This group has become quite powerful and currently has a budget of over $2 million. While the organization has done much valuable work and worked to build relationships with many groups and individuals, it has also used its power to try to control the movement and marginalize committed activists who support full justice for Palestinians. When JVP’s actions against me became public, many people opposed them and called for such attacks to end. Some created an Open Letter supporting me and opposing the divisive attacks, and over 2,000 people signed it, including many members of JVP. It appears that the majority of activists support me and If Americans Knew. Some, however, taken in by JVP’s accusations, or who themselves wish to dominate the movement, support what JVP is doing.
Why do the Zionist lobbies persecute Mrs. Alison Weir? Are they afraid of a Righteous bringer of light?
I think that Zionists of all stripes fear exposure of the full facts on this issue. While open Zionists, soft Zionists (people who only oppose the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank but support Israel’s core, discriminatory identity), and many people who say they are no longer Zionists but who still seem to have an emotional attachment to Israel have long opposed If Americans Knew, my book seems to have particularly triggered escalated attacks on me. This book, which is thoroughly cited, exposes the fact that Zionists have worked to manipulate the U.S. since the late 1800s and contains facts that Israel partisans clearly wish to keep hidden. Fortunately, despite their attempts to bury the book and to prevent my speaking engagements, the book is enjoying considerable popularity and we have now sold over 25,000 copies. It is now listed on Amazon as a bestseller in several categories. I expect its success will lead to even more attacks on me of all sorts ; some of the most insidious, sadly, will quite likely continue to be from those who claim to be part of the Palestine solidarity movement.
How is it that we saw Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to terrorist Al Nusra treated in Israeli field hospitals? Do Daesh and Al-Qaeda come from the same terrorist matrix as the State of Israel?
From its earliest beginnings, the Israeli strategy has been one of “divide and conquer.” Israeli leaders feel that any and all actions that cause strife within and among its neighbors benefits Israel, and Israel has often played a role in creating and/or nurturing such strife. This tactic has been discussed in a number of Israeli strategy papers.
You lived with Palestinians in the occupied territories, what is your testimony about their daily life under Israeli occupation?
In some areas they are shelled and invaded frequently, people killed and injured routinely. Even in the areas that are usually free of this outright violence, Palestinians are living in prisons in which Israel controls their lives and prevents their ability to protect their children – Israel decides where and whether they can travel and takes any action against Palestinians it wishes, strip searching women and children; abducting men, women, and children at will; imprisoning them without trial; perpetrating physical and psychological torture against them with impunity; preventing them from free contact with the rest of the world.
Does not Israel constitute a threat for peace in the world notably with its nuclear power?
Israel has long been a major threat to peace. It has caused numerous wars and encouraged still more. Its possession of nuclear weapons threatens the region and beyond and its actions could trigger a global conflagration.
More and more voices in the world are protesting against Israeli domination, as we saw it during the last open-air massacre in Gaza. How do you explain this change in favor of the Palestinian cause?
With the Internet, more and more people are learning the facts. People are increasingly seeing Israeli violence that used to be hidden from the world.
How do you explain that the Zionist state of Israel is called the Jewish state by referring to the Hebrew religion; and why are those who are against the Israeli criminal policy or the Zionist lobbies qualified anti-Semitic?
Israel does not define “Jewish” as a religious designation, it defines it as an ethnic identity. Israel claims that anyone who exposes or opposes its human rights violations is “anti-Semitic” as a tactic to prevent such opposition and to marginalize those whose facts they wish to hide. As a former Israeli Knesset member said a while ago, “It’s a trick; we always use it.”
Is not the Christian fundamentalism the real creator of the Zionist State of Israel, as it is found in some ancient texts either in Britain or the United States?
No, this isn’t what led to the creation of Israel. While there are some passages within Hebrew and Christian texts that some individuals have long interpreted as meaning that all Jews are meant to go to Israel (these interpretations are contested by most respected theologians, including fundamentalist theologians), such groups never brought this about. It was the political Zionist movement largely begun by Theodor Herzl in the late 1800s that Israel and others accurately consider the movement that founded Israel. This movement worked to propagandize every sector of the United States, including both Christians and Jews. There is quite a bit of information about this in my book. Today, while many Christian fundamentalists support Israel because of the manipulation that occurred and still occurs in the U.S., more and more of these individuals are changing their views when they learn the facts. There are now many Christian fundamentalists (and Jews) who are working fervently for justice for Palestinians.
You founded If America Knew and you are President of the Council for the National Interest, can you explain to us what is the role of these two organizations?
I founded If Americans Knew to give Americans the full facts on Palestine and on the role of the United States in this conflict. Most Americans have no idea that the U.S. government gives massive amounts of money to Israel and shields it from deserved international condemnation. Similarly, most Americans have no idea of the history of this issue, and of the ongoing oppression of Palestinians. Finally, most Americans have no idea of the size, history, and significance of the Zionist lobby in the U.S. and the degree to which it influences policies that are immoral, irrational, and that cause great harm to people throughout the world, including Americans.
The Council for the National Interest was founded in 1989 to counter the Israel lobby. Its goal was to work for policies that would be in the interests of all Americans, an extremely diverse population, rather than for one tiny interest group. Its two main founders, former Congressmen Paul Findley and Pete McCloskey were both pushed out of office by Israel partisans when these men began to advocate for justice for Palestinians. Both are deeply principled individuals who had also opposed the Vietnam War and racism.
What can a world scale activist as you are say to all resistants worldwide against Zionism and the fascist State of Israel?
I’m very surprised, but honored, to see you refer to me as a “world scale activist.” I’m just one of a multitude of people who are joining together to work for justice for Palestinians and to oppose violence, racism, and oppression. I have no doubt that we will eventually succeed. The main point is to continue our work, to refuse to be divided from one another, and not to give up. We are an extremely diverse movement and I believe that is part of our strength, along with the worthiness of our cause and the nobility and courage of those who came before us. We are of all different faiths and backgrounds, of all ages and races, and we won’t be stopped.
Who is Alison Weir?
Alison Weir is an American writer and an activist for the Palestinian cause. She is the founder and director of the non-profit organization If Americans Knew and president of the Council for the National Interest. In 2001, Alison Weir left her job as editor of a weekly newspaper and traveled alone to the Palestinian territories during the Second Intifada. She visited the West Bank and Gaza and witnessed the scenes of violence, seeing the truth of the conflict on the ground, and from where she wrote about her encounters with Palestinian suffering and with the “incredible arrogance, cruelty, selfishness” of Israelis. She was amazed by what she learned: That the truth of the conflict, on the ground, bore almost no resemblance to the stories told in US media. She returned to the US determined to change that. She began to speak and write on the topic and founded If Americans Knew, a nonprofit dedicated to accurately informing Americans. More recently, she also accepted a position as president of the Council for the National Interest.
Alison Weir was a civil rights activist and Peace Corps volunteer. Alison Weir has spoken all over the United States, including two briefings on Capitol Hill, presentations at the National Press Club in Washington DC (broadcast nationally on C-Span), Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine (one also broadcast on C-Span), at World Affairs Councils, and at numerous universities including Harvard Law School, Columbia, Stanford, Berkeley, Yale, Georgetown, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Vassar, the Naval Postgraduate Institute, Purdue, Northwestern, and the University of Virginia.She has given papers at various international conferences, lectured in Ramallah and at the University of Qatar, presented at the Asia Media Summits in Kuala Lumpur and Beijing, and given speaking tours in England, Wales, Iran and Qatar.
Alison Weir has also written widely on Israel-Palestine, the US connection, and media coverage. Her first book, Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel, was published in February 2014 and has received high praise. Her essays and articles have appeared in a number of books and magazines, among them The New Intifada (Verso), Censored 2005 (Seven Stories Press), Encyclopedia of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Rienner), The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, San Francisco Bay View newspaper, CounterPunch, and The Link.
Alison Weir has received various awards and in 2004 was inducted into honorary membership of Phi Alpha Literary Society, founded in 1845 at Illinois College. The award cited her as a “Courageous journalist-lecturer on behalf of human rights, the first woman to receive an honorary membership in Phi Alpha history.”
The number of displaced people from areas controlled by Daesh in Iraq has increased to 3.6 million over the past two years, the Iraqi Minister of Immigration and Displacement Jassim Mohammed said on Monday.
The minister pointed out in a statement that 600,000 displaced people have returned to their original home areas during the past two years.
Chairman of the Parliament Committee on Displacement and Migration Raed Duhluki warned on Monday of a humanitarian catastrophe potentially facing those displaced due to a lack of funding from the government.
The official called on the Iraqi government, the international community and human rights organizations to form government and political delegations in order to bring the necessary funds from donor countries to provide aid to displaced Iraqis.
The minister warned that the authority’s indifference towards the suffering of those displaced will cause a catastrophe.
Investigative journalist William Boardman’s findings on US vaporization of Marshall Islands and human experimentation on Marshall Islands native “savages”, as they were classed by US media:
“Nuclear Savage” is a recent documentary film that explores American nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands, 1946-1958, and particularly the secret Project 4.1: an American experiment in exposing Pacific Islanders to overdoses of radiation – deliberate human radiation poisoning – just to get better data on this method of maiming and killing people. The public broadcasting establishment has spent more than two years keeping this story off the air.
The preview reel of “Nuclear Savage” includes a clip with a stentorian newsreel announcer reporting on the American treatment of Marshall Islanders in April 1957, and explaining to his predominantly American audience:
“The Marshallese caught by fallout got 175 roentgens of radiation. These are fishing people, savages by our standards, so a cross-section was brought to Chicago for testing. The first was John, the mayor of Rongelap Atoll…. John, as we said, is a savage, but a happy, amenable savage.”
…
“Some use the term ‘savage’ to refer to people from primitive cultures, but nuclear experimentation pushed savagery to new levels. In the 1950s, the U.S. conducted 67 atomic and hydrogen bomb tests in the Marshall Islands, vaporizing islands and exposing entire populations to fallout. The islanders on Rongelap received near fatal doses of radiation from one test, and were then moved onto a highly contaminated island to serve as human guinea pigs for 30 years.”
Horowitz, the director of Nuclear Savage, notes that the US “bl[e]w up all these islands … purposely contaminated all these people as human experiments.”
Boardman continues:
In 1998, staff from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) made a comparison study to compare the amount of radioactive Iodine-131 at four different radiation-polluted sites, measured in curies (1,000 curies of Cesium-137, as found in a radiation therapy machine, could produce serious health effects in a direct exposure of just a few minutes). The CDC team reported its finding that the atmospheric release of curies of Iodine-137 at the Hanford nuclear processing plant was 739,000 curies; at Chernobyl the release was 40 million curies; at the Nevada bomb test site, 150 million curies; and in the Marshall Islands, 6.3 billion curies (more that 30 times as much radiation as the other three sites combined).
Even recently, the US has tried “to re-re-settle some populations back to their home islands that were still dangerously radioactive.” However, the film helped rally the islanders and reduced the US re-re-settlement effort to nothing more than “a bunch of empty houses.”
One year ago, nearly to the day, the Marshall Islands bravely brought a lawsuit to the International Court of Justice and U.S. Federal District Court “against the U.S. and the eight other Nuclear Weapons States (NWS)”, which are refusing “to meet their treaty obligations to disarm.”
Obama, in direct contravention of US word and legal requirement, is devoting 1 to 1.5 trillion dollars to US nuclear weapons development, even as the US, also illegally, cuts off water to some of its own, poor residents.
From 1946-1958, the US conducted 67 nuclear weapons experiments on the Marshall Islands, the equivalent of “one-and-a-half Hiroshima bombs” every day.
On a related note, Obama continues to refuse to give the country of Diego Garcia back to its indigenous inhabitants. The pristine island nation was seized and cleansed of its nationals by the US and Britain, then turned into a US toxic waste dump-site and base for Washington’s global execution and torture racket.
Seven minute trailer for Nuclear Savage:
Reporter focuses on global force dynamics and writes professionally for the film industry. On twitter @_DirtyTruths with UK-based colleague, Dean Robinson.
Mohamedou Ould Slahi has been locked up in Gitmo without charge for 14 years, but the US government “has no evidence” against him, his attorney told RT. Tortured and beaten, both ordeals exposed in his memoir from behind bars, Slahi is now hoping for release.
On June 2, Slahi appeared in a 17-minute hearing before the prison’s Periodic Review Board (PRB) that essentially holds his fate in its hands. It is the PRB that examines the risk of releasing a detainee and is set to decide whether to clear Slahi. He is the 22nd detainee to go before the board this year.
“There is no reason for him not to be cleared. He has never committed any hostile act to the United States. There is no evidence against him,” Slahi’s attorney, Nancy Hollander, told RT in its GTMO 2016 special report.
Together they have been fighting for Slahi’s freedom since 2005, when Hollander first met him in Guantanamo. She says she spends “probably third of a year” in Guantanamo to be with her client.
A native Mauritanian, Slahi’s story is an unusual one. He did not arrive at Guantanamo the way the majority of detainees did.
The primary reason for his illegal detention is not related to 9/11, but has its roots in the 1990s, when Slahi pledged allegiance to the group that would eventually become known as Al-Qaeda. He stopped his engineering studies in Germany to go fight along with the mujahideen against the communist government in Afghanistan.
At the time, the Islamist group and its leader Osama bin Laden enjoyed the support of the US in its fight against the Soviets.
Slahi claims he had “broken ties” with Al-Qaeda in 1992 to return to his studies in Germany. Nearly ten years after, when Al-Qaeda became Washington’s top enemy, Slahi turned himself in for questioning to Mauritanian authorities.
On November 1, 2001, he was interrogated in relation to the so-called 2000 millennium attack plots, a series of foiled attacks, including the one at a Los Angeles airport planned for late December 1999.
It appeared that when Slahi lived in Canada in 1999, he crossed paths with Ahmed Ressam, a convicted perpetrator of the thwarted attacks. The two prayed in the same mosque in Montreal.
After Ressam’s arrest, Slahi was questioned several times, including by the FBI and each time cleared for release.
That was not the case at his last meeting with Mauritanian authorities. Slahi was detained and then handed over to Jordan, where he spent eight months. After subsequent chain of custody transfers, he was put in Guantanamo.
Now, 14 years later, Slahi is one of the most prominent prisoners among 80 remaining Guantanamo detainees.
“He is a very funny person, a very empathic, very curious and of course as everyone has seen now a very gifted writer,” Nancy Hollander said of Slahi, describing their work together as “a very warm relationship.”
Shali has gone through torture, beatings, death threats and sexual humiliation, all of which he exposed in details in his bestselling book, ‘Guantanamo Diary,’ written in his single cell.
“There is no doubt that he was tortured during early years, 2003-2004,” Hollander told RT. “Finally, they realized that they were not going to learn anything from him they did not already know because he had nothing else to tell him. They began then to rehabilitate him.”
At one point, his captors tried to trick him by showing him a forged letter from his mother, but the ploy failed for two reasons. One is that the forgery misspelled Slahi’s name and, second, because unbeknownst to his jailers, his mother was illiterate.
He eventually became friends with his guards. In April 2016, one of the guards submitted a letter to the PRB, speaking of his very pleasant impression of Slahi.
“Based on my interactions with Mr. Slahi while in Guantanamo, I would be pleased to welcome him into my home,” the guard wrote.
In 2010, federal judge James Robertson reviewed Slahi’s profile, the same one the government submitted to the PRB, and granted him his habeas corpus petition, ordering him released.
However, the decision was appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Now, Slahi has his hopes high for the PRB to rule on his release.
“I believe, I hope that Mohamedou will be cleared, there is no reason for him not to be and then for the State Department to start working with Mauritania. The country of Mauritania has said they would welcome him home. That’s where his family is,” Hollander told RT.
Dr. Samir al-Qadi, member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, was among one of at least nine Palestinians arrested by the Israeli occupation forces early Sunday, 12 June, in armed night raids in Jerusalem and throughout the West Bank.
Al-Qadi, 60, was arrested in an early-morning military raid on his home in Surif, northeast of Al-Khalil. He is a member of the Change and Reform Bloc in the PLC, associated with Hamas.
Al-Qadi was among at least four Palestinians arrested in al-Khalil district, alongside Ahmed Abdelfattah Hudoush, 30; Izz al-Ghaith; and Shaher Daoud, 40; as well as three in Jerusalem, Mohammed Ruweidi, Hamza al-Nimr and Musa Dabbagh, all working in the Islamic Waqf; Amer Samih Hamdan, 17, of Bethlehem; and Thaer Abu Zaher, 25, of Deir Bzeigh near Ramallah, reported the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society.
He has been arrested and imprisoned by Israeli occupation forces on multiple occasions in the past, in 1997, 2006, 201 and 2014, generally under administrative detention without charge or trial. He joins 6 more PLC members in Israeli prisons: 4 fellow Change and Reform Bloc PLC members, Hassan Yousef, Hatem Kufaisheh, Mohammed Abu Teir, and Abdel Jaber Fuquha; Ahmad Sa’adat, the General Secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, elected on the Abu Ali Mustafa slate; and Marwan Barghouthi of Fateh.
Gaza Strip, occupied Palestine – Last Wednesday Rajab Khaled Abu Riela, 30 years old, his brother and two cousins left Gaza’s port at 12 pm. They stayed out fishing until 1:30 am. “When we started our way back to the port one Israeli warship approached, the soldiers started insulting us through the microphone and immediately after started shooting against our two small boats with live ammunition”. “Then their warship crashed against us. In that moment I decided to try to escape, but I was immediately shot in the leg with live ammunition”. They took Rajab and his brother to Ashdod port, where they wouldn’t give him any medicine or treatment for the injury he sustained by the Israeli forces. “I was left bleeding until 9:30am”. Finally they were sent back to Gaza, where an ambulance took him directly from Erez border to the hospital, where he had to undergo surgery.
When he finally reached Shifa Hospital, doctors managed to remove the biggest pieces of the bullet – but many small pieces still remain in his leg.
Rajab’s mother shows the bullet removed from his leg
“Our future [for the fishermen] is uncertain; we don’t know what will happen tomorrow. Israel assaults us every day, takes our boats, shoots at us… Since 2005 I have pain in my chest due to an attack of the occupation, and as well my brother was injured while fishing in 2008. I’m responsible for providing for my family, we are 21 members… Now no one is providing for us, as I’m injured and they took our boat and motor. How I can work now without a boat?”
The economy of the state of Israel that enables it to treat the international community with such contempt, is dependent entirely upon its trade with the EU single market. And that, apart from any other consideration, is another important reason for the UK to vote to leave the European Union.
The position of the EU as Israel’s primary trading partner is enabled under the EU-Israel Association Agreement, notwithstanding that Article 2 of that Agreement very clearly states:
“Relations between the parties, as well as all the provisions of the Agreement itself, shall be based on respect for human rights and democratic principles, which guides their internal and international policy and constitutes an essential element of this agreement.”
It is a blatant fact that Israel – as illegal occupier of the Occupied Palestinian Territories has been in gross breach of this provision since the very inception of the Agreement and yet the EU has turned a blind eye to the continuing violations that include the illegal settlement of over a half a million Israelis on Palestinian soil in a deliberate effort to prevent the establishment of an independent state for the largest indigenous people of the region.
The reason for this intolerable state of affairs is unquestionably the influence of the lobbyists embedded within the councils and committees of the European Union at virtually every level in Brussels and elsewhere, who exert a corrupting effect upon EU political and economic policy in order to skew EU political decisions, funding and bilateral trade to the favour of the (non-member) Israeli state.
A vote to divorce the United Kingdom from the EU would clearly indicate British rejection of such artificial and dangerous ‘arrangements’ that have such an adverse impact upon both regional and world peace.
RT traveled to the site of the most avoidable public health emergency of the decade, interviewing those who defied authorities and spent their time and money to uncover the lead poisoning that has affected thousands of residents of Flint, Michigan.
“The water is not safe yet. And we are traumatized by the unknowns of tomorrow: what is this lead going to do for our community? What does it mean? Moms are coming to clinic, they just hear “brain damage” and “irreversible neurotoxin,” Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha told documentary-maker Miguel Francis-Santiago, when he visited the city earlier this year, to find out that while Flint may have left the headlines, the impact of years of errors and cover-ups has not been smoothed over.
“There is no treatment for lead, there is no lead pill, there is no lead antibiotic… There’s not some magic thing that we can do to reverse this,” said Hanna-Attisha.
A prominent pediatrician, Mona Hanna-Attisha personally undertook testing for blood lead levels in local children, following hundreds of complaints of fatigue, nausea and malaise resulting from drinking the discolored, often strange-smelling liquid that flowed from Flint’s faucets after it changed its water source in 2014.
Hanna-Attisha noted that dangerous lead levels had doubled in just a matter of months, but her findings were disregarded by top local officials, who repeatedly claimed that the water was safe in public, even as they already noted concerns in private.
As her claims have been verified, her critics have been forced to apologize, while Hanna-Attisha’s research has been published, and she has been awarded a PEN prize for speaking out.
Hanna-Attisha said she was doing her job, but Virginia Tech Engineering Professor, said he went “a bit crazy” – spending over $100,000 of his own money to conduct a study to definitively prove contamination after being dispatched to conduct a study in 2015.
Edwards correctly pinpointed the problem with the multi-million dollar filtration plant the local authorities began using just over two years, to save money by pumping and treating water from Flint River, instead of purchasing it from Lake Huron.
“If they had just followed the law, if they’d added a corrosion inhibitor, that switch to Flint River water would have actually saved money, none of these problems would have happened, you know. If they had just put that phosphate in the water, we wouldn’t have had the pipe leaks, wouldn’t have had the lead in water, wouldn’t have had the legionella,” said Edwards, referring to an outbreak of the disease that killed 10 people in the months while the plant was operational.
But Edwards reserves his harshest words for senior regional Environmental Protection Agency official Susan Hedman, who he says “incredibly” used her role to “cover-up” the crisis, keeping Flint residents oblivious to the harm they were doing themselves, just as Edwards himself was going round houses and warning residents to avoid the water. Hedman has since resigned.
While many lives were saved through the intervention of several public crusaders, others were not.
Nakiya Wakes already suspected something was amiss when her two children’s hair started falling out after being washed with local water, but pregnant with twins at the time, she did not know that worse was to come.
Late last year, she suffered two miscarriages, losing one child after the other.
“I feel like if they would’ve let the city of Flint know this, my babies would have been born on February 11 of 2016. Back in 2015 when I was coming home from the hospital I got a letter from the City of Flint saying that pregnant women and people 55 and over should not be drinking this water,” she told Miguel-Santiago.
“So I got to thinking then, I just lost my babies, what is in the water? So… I immediately had my kids tested for lead, and they tested 5.0, they tested positive for high levels of lead. They can’t tell me long-term what’s going happen to my kids?”
The full documentary will be broadcast on RT on June 12, and every day until June 14 on RTD.
Thanks to FBI meddling, a straightforward electronic communications privacy reform with bipartisan support and barely any opposition is now stalled, and is dangerously close to dying this session.
The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) became law in 1986, and hasn’t been updated since. The statute, which governs law enforcement access to electronic communications, contains an obsolete clause enabling government agencies to obtain stored communications without warrants as long as the records are over 180 days old. This provision made more sense when the law was passed, at a time when computer data storage was expensive and most people couldn’t afford to store anything in digital form for as long as 6 months. Today, when storage is cheap and many people have emails dating back a decade in their Gmail inboxes, the law makes no sense. For years now, advocates including the ACLU and major tech companies have been furiously lobbying to update the law. This year, the House finally passed an ECPA modernization bill, which if enacted would do away with the 6 month rule and instituting a warrant requirement for content across the board—no matter how long the information has been sitting in your Dropbox folder or Gmail account. After the unanimous House vote, I and others expected the reform to quickly move through the Senate and get a signature from President Obama. Finally!
Alas, that’s not what is happening.
Unfortunately, the FBI intervened, and now the bill has a poison pill in it. Republican Senator John Cornyn attached an amendment to the bill that would vastly expand the FBI’s power to use much-abused ‘National Security Letters,’ or NSLs, secret subpoenas. Email privacy supporters Senators Pat Leahy and Mike Lee have said they will pull the bill from consideration instead of allowing their efforts to be coopted by the FBI—which intends to broaden its surveillance authorities, instead of contract them, as the email privacy bill intends.
“Unfortunately, some Senators on the committee have decided late in the day that this bill should be a vehicle to move an unrelated and controversial expansion of the use of national security letters by the FBI,” Lee said. “Such an expansion would swallow up the protections this bill offers to the American people. While there are other concerns we had hoped to negotiate, the national security letter amendment is something I cannot in good conscience have attached to this bill.”
FBI Director James Comey has said getting the NSL power extended to internet information is his organization’s top legislative priority.
THE EU is not defending workers’ rights as the Remainiacs never cease to claim.
In fact the EU is directly behind the huge assault on wages, pensions, collective bargaining and other workers’ rights across the EU, including the current battle going on in France.
Moreover it is being done in contravention of its own treaties in a typically bureaucratic and Byzantine way.
Officially, the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU, Article 153.5), explicitly states that the EU has no competences in the area of wage policy.
Yet this has not prevented EU institutions such as the European Commission, the European Central Bank (ECB) or even the European Council from demanding wage “moderation” across the EU.
The Broad Economic Policy Guidelines (BEPG), regularly produced by the Commission since 1993, always included demands for wage “moderation.”
However a new system of European economic governance began to emerge in 2010 with the adoption of the controversial, neoliberal Europe 2020 strategy, which included a yearly cycle of EU economic policy co-ordination.
This explicitly includes wage policy which is considered the most important adjustment variable for promoting “competitiveness.”
The legal basis for this new form of “authoritarian neoliberalism” as it has been called comprises above all the Euro Plus Pact adopted on the initiative of Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy in March 2011.
As a result, while EU competence over wage policy is still expressly forbidden, with the Euro Plus Pact wage policy intervention at EU level is now mystically allowed.
Now the EU issues annual policy recommendations for all member states which must then be transformed into national “reform programmes” whose effectiveness will again be assessed by the EU.
The annual economic co-ordination cycle was further developed in 2011 with the adoption of a package of five Regulations and one Directive.
The so-called “six-pack” contains two new major instruments in order to intensify economic policy co-ordination: one is the establishment of a new system of surveillance and the second is the introduction of fines on those countries that fail to comply.
The 2013 Treaty for Stability, Co-ordination and Governance (TSCG) further reinforced mechanisms to enable the EU to “co-ordinate and monitor the economic and budgetary policies of the member states.”
Each February the Commission publishes detailed reports on each country and their “progress.” This year’s report pointed out an “excessive” imbalance — too much public expenditure and a lack of competitiveness.
However, it recorded “substantial progress in the matter of reducing the cost of labour and retirement pension reform.”
On April 13, the French government adopted its EU National Programme of Reform (NPR) and acquiesced to EU demands for “giving more latitude to companies, to adapt wages and working hours to their economic situation” — ie huge changes to French employment law.
It is this that French workers are fighting against.
The scope for EU attacks on wages and collective bargaining expanded most rapidly in those crisis-hit countries which rely on “bailouts” from the EU and/or the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
In exchange for bailouts, these countries had to introduce “reforms” laid down either in so-called memorandums of understanding with the Troika of EU, European Central Bank (ECB) and IMF in the case of Greece, Ireland and Portugal, or in “stand-by arrangements” with the IMF, in the case of Hungary, Latvia and Romania.
These policy measures comprised attacks on wages, social services and public ownership and far-reaching labour market “reforms” including the abolition of systems of collective bargaining.
There is a simple reason for this — where there is no collective bargaining there is a decline in wages.
For the hard-line German member of the ECB Executive Board Joerg Asmussen, labour market “reforms” such as removing collective rights are even “the key if a country wishes to remain within the euro.”
As a result attacks on workers at national level are being driven by a new EU interventionism in an unprecedented way.
For example prior to the 2008 crisis, Romania had a legal system that supported dialogue between trade unions, employers and the government, resulting in widespread collective bargaining at all levels.
By 2011, at the behest of the EU, the government had scrapped all collective agreements and changed, without parliamentary debate, the main labour laws, making it impossible to have cross-sectoral collective agreements.
The recession was thus exploited by the EU and a compliant government in Bucharest as a pretext to rip the guts out of the existing industrial relations system and lower labour costs.
Even the EU-funded European Trade Union Confederation general secretary Bernadette Segol identified two fronts where collective bargaining is coming under attack: the decentralisation of bargaining and allowing employers to ignore trade union bodies in favour of non-union bodies.
Addressing the theme of Social Europe, she points out that “policies that are being implemented are attacking industrial relations systems, putting pressure on wages, weakening public services and weakening social protection.
“These are the core aspects of the social model,” confirming the view of many observers that the model is now dead — if indeed it was ever alive at all.
Brian Denny is a spokesman for Trade Unionists Against the EU.
By Tony Cartalucci – New Eastern Outlook – 29.11.2017
The United States Air Force’s 59th Medical Wing’s molecular biology branch recently was revealed to have been collecting specifically Russian RNA and synovial (connective) tissue samples, prompting fears in Russia of a possible US directed ethnic-specific bioweapons program. … continue
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