Israeli forces demolish 3 houses in East Jerusalem
Ma’an – June 2, 2015
JERUSALEM – Israeli forces demolished three Palestinian homes in the Silwan neighborhood and Salah al-Din street in occupied East Jerusalem early Tuesday morning, the owners told Ma’an.
They were told that the houses were demolished because they had been built without necessary licenses from the municipal council.
Nidal Abu Rmeila said bulldozers under Israeli army escort had demolished two apartments, totaling 140 square meters, that he had been building in Silwan near the Moroccan Gate of the Al-Aqsa mosque compound.
Abu Rmeila said he had not been able to obtain a license from the Jerusalem municipality as the building was located close to the Al-Aqsa compound in an area he claimed the Israeli antiquities authority is “greedily” interested in.
He began construction in late 2014, after which the municipality inspectors ordered him to stop, issuing a demolition order.
Abu Rmeila said the order was postponed several times, adding that bulldozers had arrived two weeks ago to demolish the house, but left after it became clear they were too big to access the building.
Tuesday’s demolition was only possible, he said, after the Israelis “used a lift to carry small excavators and bring them close to the site.”
Abu Rmeila said Israeli troops had assaulted members of his family when they evacuated the home before the demolition.
He said that relatives Hashim Abu Rmeila, Izz al-Din Abu Rmeila and Nur al-Din Abu Rmeila sustained bruises, while his 70-year-old mother was injured when soldiers fired tear gas canisters into the house.
Separately on Tuesday, Israeli forces demolished the upper story of a house on Salah al-Din Street near the Old City belonging to Rafiq al-Salayma.
A relative of the owner Abu Jabir al-Salayma told Ma’an that Israeli troops raided the house at 6 a.m. and forcibly evacuated the family before workers set about demolishing the upper floor.
The family house was built long ago, al-Salayma said, but “because the house was too small” they had added a new floor and roofed it with clay tiles.
The demolitions come less than a week after another house was demolished in Silwan.
Silwan is one of many Palestinian neighborhoods in occupied East Jerusalem witness to an influx of Israeli settlers at the cost of ongoing demolition of Palestinian homes and eviction of Palestinian families.
While Jewish residents frequently take over Palestinian buildings with the protection of Israeli forces, government policies make it nearly impossible for Palestinian residents to obtain building permits, according to Israeli rights group the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.
Law Enforcement Agencies Use Tasers Over 300,000 Times A Year
By Sarah Kaufman | vocativ | June 1, 2015
The use of a Taser in the fatal shooting of a black man by a cop in South Carolina earlier this year has reignited a debate about how safe they are and whether police are relying too heavily on them. Many people, especially residents of North Charleston, S.C., where the shooting occurred, have expressed concern that Tasers pose a health risk to some who are involved in run-ins with police.
Officer Michael T. Slager of the North Charleston Police Department fatally shot Walter L. Scott on April 4 in North Charleston. The incident was recorded on tape by a bystander, and the officer’s use of a Taser was documented as well.
Here’s a look at some of the numbers behind the raging debate over Tasers:
Slager had used his Taser 14 times in five years
The record shows Slager was no stranger to the Taser’s electrical charge, The New York Times reported. He used his Taser six times in 2014 alone, according to police documents. That’s four percent of the department’s total Taser use.
North Charleston’s police deployed Tasers 825 times in four years
That means the department, on average, performed 206 tasings per year. For comparison, The New York Times offered Tyler, Texas, a town similar in population but with 150 fewer police officers. Tyler’s department used Tasers 65 times in the same time period, or roughly only 30 percent of the tasings that occurred in North Charleston.
Over 18,000 law enforcement agencies have Tasers
The weapon is highly prevalent, according to Taser International. But there is no publicly available national standard for law enforcement in using one.
Tasers are used 900 times a day
Taking that data from Taser International and assuming every day is relatively consistent in Taser usage, that’s 328,500 tasings a year.
Tasers have been blamed for over 500 deaths
While Taser International says it has conducted independent studies to verify the weapon’s safety, some medical experts say the electric jolts can pose sometimes fatal threats to a person’s health. According to Amnesty International, Tasers are responsible for at least 500 deaths.
The hunt for conscripts to the Ukrainian army
The latest recruitment methods in Ukraine | 27. Juni 2015 | www.kla.tv from KlagemauerTV on Vimeo.
The New Cold War | May 31, 2015
The [originally posted] video [which has been sent down the memory hole by Youtube] shot in the city of Kharkiv, eastern Ukraine shows soldiers and police boarding public transport to hunt for young men and issue them military draft notices. But passengers and the bus driver shout at them, eventually forcing them to leave the bus.
Passengers shout, “F*** off!” “What are you telling me? You’ve no right.” “Leave the bus before you are kicked off of it” “Get out!”
In the end, the confused looking soldiers are obliged to leave the bus.
A Ukrainian editor commenting on the film footage writes on Facebook, “One cannot but feel in these past months a certain despair among our pro-Maidan nationalists and patriots. They realize only too well the limited base of support for their agenda and that the patriotic wave in support of their civil war is almost exhausted.
Most Americans oppose the Patriot Act
Press TV – May 31, 2015
A new poll in America reveals a startling fact: most Americans oppose the Patriot Act, used by the National Security Agency as a legal basis to spy on its own citizens.
Despite mass resentment, their Government is determined to continue using it for spying on them. Much of the data collected is of no relevance to national security and no administration in US history has spied more closely than Obama’s administration into the lives of innocent Americans.
Repeated calls by American citizens for the repeal of the Patriot Act and the closure of the highly controversial National Security Agency have been ignored.
In May 2015, the Federal Appeals Court ruled mass data collection was not legal, and the US Congress narrowly refused to sanction an extension of some powers.
Yet American President Barack Obama still has vast powers to allow surveillance of calls to, from and inside the US, as well as authorizing snooping on other digital communications. Many Americans now say they distrust their own government.
Oklahoma troopers rush to ‘help’ stranded motorists, shoot and kill non-compliant pastor
RT | May 31, 2015
A flood “rescue mission” turned fatal for one Oklahoma man, who was shot and killed by a state trooper. Police claimed that the man did not want to leave his vehicle, argued and allegedly attacked officers as they tried to get him out of the water.
The incident took place some 20 miles outside of Tulsa when Okmulgee County state troopers came to the rescue of two men trying to save their car stranded at a roadway from rushing water on Friday.
The water levels were rising too rapidly, and the troopers we “worried about them getting swept away,” according to Capt. Paul Timmons who spoke of the incident with the press on Saturday.
“[The troopers] were trying to get them to come out of the water,” Timmons said. “(The men), for whatever reason, were just really upset about having to leave the vehicle there.”
When the two unfortunate drivers got to the dry land, at least one of them allegedly attacked the officers and was shot and killed, AP reports.
“It’s not real clear how it all transpired,” Timmons admitted. A weapon was reportedly recovered from one of the suspects, but it remains unclear whether the man fired at the troopers. The second man was arrested for assault and public intoxication. Their identities were not revealed.
Local news however reported the victim as a 35-year-old Nehemiah Fischer, a pastor of a local church, while the second man was identified as his brother.
Meanwhile the troopers did not suffer any injuries. The superiors are due to decide whether the officers should be placed on leave following the incident.
Fatal US police shootings in 2015 at 385: Report
The Los Angeles Police Department engages in an altercation that ended in the death of a homeless man on March 1, 2015
Press TV – May 31, 2015
A new report shows that US police have shot and killed 385 people during the first five months of 2015, an average of more than two fatal shootings a day.
The death rate is over twice the account tallied by the federal government during the past 10 years, which officials admit is incomplete, according to a Washington Post analysis published on Saturday.
“These shootings are grossly underreported,” said Jim Bueermann, a former police chief and president of the Washington-based Police Foundation, a nonprofit organization which works to improve law enforcement.
“We are never going to reduce the number of police shootings if we don’t begin to accurately track this information,” Bueermann was quoted by The Post as saying.
The analysis is the result of information The Post is compiling on every fatal shooting by police in 2015 in addition to data of every officer killed by gunfire in the line of duty.
The data is related to shootings and does not include killings by other means, such as stun guns and deaths in police custody.
The study shows that almost half the victims were minority. However, the demographics shifted markedly among the unarmed victims, with two-thirds being African American or Hispanic.
On the whole, US police killed blacks at three times the rate of whites or other minorities when adjusting by the population of the census tracts, where the shootings took place.
A large proportion of the victims, over 80 percent, were armed with objects, including guns, knives, machetes, revving vehicles and, in one case, a nail gun.
49 people were not armed with any weapons, while the guns used by 13 others were not real. Overall, 16 percent were either carrying a toy or were unarmed, according to The Post.
Several current and former police chiefs and other criminal justice officials said it was time police accepted responsibility for the bloodshed. They argued that a vast majority of the killings, examined by The Post, resulted from poor policing.
“We have to get beyond what is legal and start focusing on what is preventable. Most are preventable,” said Ronald L. Davis, a former police chief, who heads the Justice Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services.
Police “need to stop chasing down suspects, hopping fences and landing on top of someone with a gun,” Davis said. “When they do that, they have no choice but to shoot.”
The report came as many US cities have been the scene of protests over the deaths of several unarmed African Americans by white police officers and decisions by grand juries not to indict the officers.
Another analysis by The Post and researchers at Bowling Green State University, released last week, showed that only 54 officers have been charged for thousands of fatal shootings at the hands of police across the United States over the past decade.
NY Times Applauds While Israel Robs Palestine of Water
By Barbara Erickson | TimesWarp | May 30, 2015
The New York Times invites us to gaze with wonder on the miracles of Israeli technology today, with a page 1 photo and story touting the innovations that have saved the country from drought. Because of wise policies and applied science, we learn, “there is plenty of water in Israel.”
The Times never tells us, however, that a significant number of those who reside on the land are seriously deprived of water: Palestinians in some areas of the West Bank are forced to survive on only 20 liters of water a day per person, well below the World Health Organization minimum of 60 liters. In Gaza 90 percent of the water is unfit to drink.
Meanwhile, Israelis in West Bank settlements “generally have access to as much running water as they please,” according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, and Israelis over all use three times as much water as Palestinians. Settlers also confiscate West Bank springs, and Israeli security forces destroy water equipment in Palestinian villages and prevent their residents from building cisterns and wells.
In the Times story, “Aided by the Sea, Israel Overcomes an Old Foe: Drought,” Isabel Kershner writes that Israel is thriving because it has adopted recycling and desalination. She quotes at length from Israeli officials but includes not a single Palestinian voice.
Kershner manages to dismiss Palestinian concerns in two sentences: “Israel, which shares the mountain aquifer with the West Bank, says it provides the Palestinians with more water than it is obliged to under the existing peace accords. Palestinians say it is not enough and too expensive.” She feels no need to address the humanitarian crisis Israeli has created in confiscating Palestinian water for its own use.
In fact, Israel steals the water from under the feet of Palestinians, draining West Bank aquifers, allocating 73 percent of this water to Israel and another 10 percent to settlers. Palestinians are left with 17 percent, and many are forced to buy from the Israeli water company at rates up to three times as high as the tariffs charged Israelis.
Kershner omits any mention of the obvious inequalities between Israeli West Bank settlements and the Palestinian villages nearby. Settlements often have swimming pools and green, watered turf, while villages remain dusty and dry, without enough water for agriculture or even for home gardens.
The Times has also turned its back on news that underscores the outright theft of water in Palestine. It had nothing to report, for instance, when settlers recently surrounded a Palestinian spring with mines and barbed wire. The paper also remained silent when security forces destroyed pipes providing water to an impoverished Jordan Valley herding community earlier this year.
Many organizations, however, have spoken out. The United Nations, the World Bank, Amnesty International, B’Tselem, church groups, If Americans Knew, and others. They have issued reports and press releases noting that Israel violates international law in confiscating Palestinian water resources and highlighting the striking disparities between West Bank villages and Jewish settlements.
Kershner found none of this worth mentioning in her story today. Instead, we find a promotional piece that should benefit Israeli water specialists now peddling their products in California and other drought-stricken areas of the United States.
Editors and reporters are complicit in this effort to tout Israel as an enlightened and technologically advanced country, even in the face of its flagrant theft of Palestinian water. The New York Times has found an Israeli puff piece on water technology to be worth a front page spread, but it deems the criminal confiscation of this basic resource unfit to print.
Never mind Israel, it’s time to show the red card to the PA
MEMO | May 30, 2015
For many observers, the fact that Sepp Blatter was re-elected as president of FIFA came as no surprise. As expected, he was determined to stay in office despite the arrests and corruption charges this week. That Israel, unlike the European countries, supported Blatter’s candidacy is also not surprising; it is a state whose own political leaders have been tainted by corruption charges over the years.
The most shocking news from the FIFA congress in Zurich was actually the decision by Palestinian Football Association chief Jibril Rajoub to withdraw the resolution for a vote to suspend Israel from world football’s governing body. Although the Palestinian Authority (PA) is notorious for its wanton squandering of international goodwill, this latest example is arguably the worst of all. It was a golden opportunity to take the international boycott of apartheid Israel to a new level. Rajoub’s claim that he was pressured by African and Asian countries is a lame and shameless excuse. His past history as head of the PA’s preventive security agency and thus a willing collaborator with Israel on security issues demonstrates clearly where his loyalties lie on such matters.
While much of what goes on at FIFA is often shrouded in secrecy, the universal support for the Palestinian case among the member federations was well known. If anyone doubts the level of international support that was there for the taking, just consider how petrified Israeli officials became in the days leading up to the Zurich meeting.
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin described the imminent suspension from FIFA and popular calls for a cultural boycott as a “strategic threat” to his country. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued the now customary volley of threats to the PA, to Jibril Rajoub (he claims) and FIFA itself. To his credit, the Israeli leader did, at least, stand up to protect his country’s interests, which is more than can be said for the Palestinian leadership. Yet again, the PA proved that it desperately lacks the political will to do the same.
If nothing else, Rajoub’s farcical performance in Zurich confirms that the Ramallah authority cannot be trusted. It has now made it standard practice to betray the collective will and expectations of the Palestinian people. In 2008, for example, the PA obstructed the passage of a UN resolution proposed by the State of Qatar calling for an end to the blockade of the Gaza Strip. The following year, it abandoned a resolution for the Human Rights Council to forward Judge Richard Goldstone’s report on war crimes in Gaza to the UN Security Council. The PA has thus acquired a unique record of putting Israel’s interests before that of the Palestinians.
In a bizarre and theatrical manner, Rajoub took to the stage in Zurich carrying a red card – which he obviously had no intention of using – to announce that he was withdrawing the resolution because he was aware of the harm it would bring to Israel. His words amounted to an apology to the Israelis, as if their suspension from FIFA or a sporting boycott of the apartheid state was a crime.
Gideon Levy, the Israeli columnist for Haaretz newspaper, would have made a better representative for the Palestinians than Rajoub. “A soccer ban doesn’t kill anyone,” he wrote. “A boycott spills no blood. It is a legitimate weapon to establish justice and apply international law.”
That said, there are others, including Rajoub, who claim that politics should be kept out of sports. Of course, they would say that wouldn’t they, especially when it suits their interests to do so. But didn’t the US lead an international boycott of the 1980 summer Olympics in Moscow after the former Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan? Didn’t the Thatcher government in Britain as well as France and Australia support the boycott, leaving the decision about whether or not to compete to individual athletes? Similarly today, it is up to every individual citizen of the world to take a stand on Israeli apartheid. To advocate anything else would be sheer hypocrisy.
Whatever disappointment and outrage Palestinians and the thousands of people who had been campaigning vigorously for the ban may feel after Zurich, all is not lost. This latest encounter with apartheid Israel has placed the nuclear option of a sporting and cultural boycott of the rogue state well within the reach of the masses. They do not have to wait for the approval of FIFA or even the Palestinian Authority to set it in motion.
In retrospect, the failure of the PA to seek the suspension of Israel from FIFA has nothing to do with Israel’s “international effort” as Netanyahu claimed triumphantly. It was all about the spinelessness of the Palestinian Authority and its utter dependency on Israeli and Western largesse. Forget about showing Israel the red card; it is high time for the PA to be sent for an early bath for its repeated failures to represent the people of Palestine and defend their national interests.
Ukraine humanitarian crisis ‘one of the world’s worst’ – UN refugee agency
RT | May 28, 2015
The rise in the number of refugees in the Ukrainian conflict is resulting in one of the world’s “worst humanitarian crisis” today, the UN has confirmed, as sporadic fighting and a lack of aid forces civilians flee to neighboring countries, mainly Russia.
The number of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) and those seeking refuge abroad is reaching catastrophic proportions despite the February-implemented Minsk II ceasefire agreement which barely holds ground with intermittent fighting continuing in the Donbass region.
The latest statistics from the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) show that some 857,000 Ukrainians have sought asylum in neighboring countries. That is an increase of about 23,000 people in the last two weeks.
“The situation seems to be getting worse,” William Spindler, UNHCR Senior Communications Officer for Europe, West Africa, Statelessness told RT. He says that the number of IDPs and refugees from Ukraine has surpassed 2 million people. He added that people in Donbass continue to live in “substandard accommodation” as a result of the ongoing fighting.
“1.2 million people have been displaced inside Ukraine and over 800,000 people have gone to neighboring countries,” Spindler said, confirming the latest figures disclosed by his office. He added that those fleeing to neighbouring countries have gone “mainly to the Russian Federation” as well as Belarus, Poland, Germany and France.
In the latest report on the Ukraine conflict, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimates that between mid-April 2014 and 14 May 2015, at least 6,334 people were killed and 15,752 wounded. It also reported a danger posed to civilians by “unexploded ordinance and landmines” that are still left in Donbass.
“The situation is very serious, very worrying. This is one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world today,” Spindler said.
The lack of medicine and medical equipment in conflict areas in Ukraine poses great danger, OCHA reported earlier. Both humanitarian and political efforts on the ground by the parties involved need to be “stepped up,” Spindler says, in order to reverse the dire situation that resulted from Kiev’s ongoing so-called “anti-terrorist operation” in eastern Ukraine.
“We are distributing essential aid but our efforts are not sufficient to deal with the needs,” said Spindler, stressing that more funding is needed to continue humanitarian aid work as the current financing covers only some 40 percent of the organization’s mission to Ukraine.
One of the main areas of concern for the UN refugee agency is the “difficulty” civilians have crossing the conflict line, Spindler told RT. He said that in some cases people were “separated” at the crossing line between Ukrainian and rebel controlled territories, as they tried to join their relatives or “obtain benefits that they are entitled to.”
Russia meanwhile continues to receive refugees from Ukraine, accommodating those seeking shelter in refugees camps before helping them settle all across the federation. “During multiple visits to a refugee center for Ukrainians we did not notice any problems with accommodation, food, medical services and education. Everything is organized as it should be, on the same level as for Russian citizens,” UN Refugees Agency (UNHCR) representative in Russia Baisa Vak-Voya told journalists Monday.
At the same time, Federal Migration Service chief Konstantin Romodanovsky called the situation in Ukraine a humanitarian disaster, as up to 600 Ukrainians cross into Russia daily.
“It is a catastrophe, of course. Homes have been ruined there. People vote with their feet, leaving their home country and entering Russia, where they get the status of temporary refugees – not because this is something Russia wants, but simply because there is no place they can live in,” Romodanovsky told Interfax on Monday.
Russia meanwhile estimates that over a million of Ukrainians have entered Russia since the conflict began last year, according to Valentina Kazakova, head of the Federal Migration Service’s Department for Citizenship.
Out of that number some 350,000 have applied and most of them granted temporary refuge status. “Another 105,000 have applied for entrance onto the state program for assisting the voluntary resettlement of compatriots from foreign countries,” Kazakova told Interfax earlier this month.
Since the conflict began another 195,000 Ukrainians requested temporary residence permits in Russia, while 40,000 applied for permanent residence cards and 88,000 for citizenship.
Latest Amnesty International Ukraine War Crimes Report Fails the Test
By Roger Annis | The New Cold War | May 29, 2015
Amnesty International has issued a 33-page report on the treatment of captured combatants and of civilians caught in the crossfire of the civil war (‘Anti-Terrorist Operation’) that the governing regime in Kyiv launched in eastern Ukraine in April 2014. Titled, ‘ Breaking Bodies: Torture and Summary Killings in Eastern Ukraine‘, the report presents grave allegations against the Ukrainian government and against the defense forces of the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics. Allegations include forced and illegal detentions, prisoner abuse and torture, and summary executions.
The report has made headlines in Western mainstream press. One reason for that is its authorship. Amnesty International is a respected and renowned agency. But another reason is the nature of the report itself-it accuses both sides in the civil war with equal vigour.
That appeals to editors of Western publications who for the past year have systematically ignored or downplayed the documented accusations levied against the Ukrainian government and its armed forces and allied paramilitaries in earlier human rights reports. Those include the report of Human Rights Watch in October 2014 saying that Kyiv is using cluster weapons against civilian targets, and the lengthy reports in November 2014 and March 2015 of the Moscow-based Foundation for the Study of Democracy. The Human Rights Watch report concerning cluster weapons was corroborated by a separate and coincidental New York Times investigation and by later findings of inspectors of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
Is there any basis to Amnesty International’s equal treatment and equal blame against both sides? No there is not.
Firstly, Amnesty produces no numbers to back its equivalency treatment. It says these are difficult to ascertain. This may be true for arriving at very specific numbers. But given the volume of media and human rights reports documenting human rights violations and war crimes by Kyiv, and considering that the Ukrainian government controls more than 95 per cent of the territory of the country, it is a stretch, to say the least, to make an equivalency argument.
Secondly, the Amnesty report excludes reporting on the multiple documented cases of human rights atrocities throughout Ukraine, for example the massacre in Odessa on May 2, 2014 that saw more than 50 people killed by right-wing vigilantes. It makes no mention of the economic embargo and routine interruption of aid shipments imposed by Kyiv against the rebel territory, including cutting the pensions of seniors. Instead, the report selectively chooses the band of territory proximate to the actual combat zone in the southeast of Ukraine. As if documented human rights violations by the Ukraine government elsewhere in the country would have no bearing on its conduct in the war zone, a war zone, moreover, that Kyiv has created. As if the recent string of killings of journalists and politicians in Kyiv and other cities of the country are incidental.
The Amnesty report shows extreme bias against the rebel forces in Donetsk and Lugansk by its selective language. It calls them “separatists”, “the separatist side”, or “the self-styled Donetsk People’s Republic… and Luhansk People’s Republic”.
The term “separatist” is a pejorative, used to discredit those so labelled. Considering the changes to Ukrainian law in the past year which have made the advocacy of “separatism” in Ukraine a grave criminal act, not to speak of an invitation to vigilante violence and murder against anyone so accused, it is inconceivable that a human rights organization would so carelessly use the term.
Two additional reasons make Amnesty International’s use of the term a scandal. One, there is the small matter that it is not true. The leaders of the Donetsk and Lugansk republics as well as the advocates for political rights throughout eastern Ukraine have made it clear that they are receptive to any and all political options for the Donbas territory. The leaders of Donetsk and Lugansk signed the ceasefire agreement in Minsk, Belarus to this effect on February 12, 2015. Unfortunately, the Kyiv regime refuses to adhere to the clauses in that document, including the one that obliges it to negotiate forms of political autonomy (‘federalization’) with the rebel movement (a fact which the report by Amnesty omits mentioning).
Two, Amnesty International as well as the supporters of the governing regime in Kyiv throw around the term “separatist” (by which we can understand “political self-determination” or “secession”) as if it were some high crime. It is not. It is enshrined in international law. Many of the major countries of the NATO military alliance presently supporting Kyiv in its war have had perfectly legal “separatism” votes take place in their territories, including in Quebec, Canada in 1976 and 1995 and in Scotland, United Kingdom in 2015. Irony of ironies, modern, independent Ukraine itself was born of two “separatist” acts which made the country independent—the revolution of 1917-18 and the vote in 1991 to discontinue the Soviet Union.
While Amnesty has harsh language for the “separatists” of Donetsk and Lugansk, the extremist militias who are fighting alongside the regular Ukrainian army and committing no end of human rights atrocities are given kid-glove treatment. The Amnesty report calls the extreme-right militias that are waging cruel war in eastern Ukraine “volunteer militia formations”. This is the same, polite language used by Western media to minimize and obfuscate who it is, exactly, the NATO countries are backing in Ukraine, including with weapons and military training. (In recent months, the extremist paramilitaries have been incorporated into Ukraine’s National Guard in order to lessen embarrassment to their NATO country benefactors.)
Amnesty’s report commits another significant travesty in the field of human rights investigation by drawing an equivalency of responsibility between the national government in Kyiv and the rebel forces in eastern Ukraine. The two are not equivalent. Kyiv has sent its army against its own people, a violation of international convention and law. Kyiv is a member of the United Nations and is a signatory to all manner of international laws and conventions obliging it to protect the human and political rights of its citizens.
Kyiv has shelled and bombarded civilian targets on a scale far in excess of whatever shells from the opposite side have incidentally struck civilian targets. Last September, when the rebel side had huge military momentum in its favour, it declined to press its advantage and retake the city of Mariupol, saying the civil damage and civilian casualties that would result were unthinkable and would be unpardonable.
Of course, the rebel military should be subject to the same standards governing human and political rights as any government. Indeed, there is ample evidence, including in this latest report by Amnesty, that the governing powers in Donetsk and Lugansk are living up to their responsibilities. But to charge them with the same degree of responsibility as the internationally recognized government in Kyiv is to make a mockery of international law. How many judges would give a free pass to rights violations by a national government were it to argue, “Hey, you can’t accuse us of war crimes, we say that the other side committed them, too.”
The fact that Kyiv is able to perpetrate war crimes and massive rights violations against its civilian population while enjoying the vigorous backing of many of the major governments of the world and of much of mainstream media, while a leading, international human rights organization apparently turns a blind eye, is a very alarming sign of the deterioration of the regime of accountability for war crimes that the post-WW2 trials against officials of Nazi Germany established.
Lastly, in its hasty and all-too-brief summary of the human rights topic it is supposedly investigating, Amnesty leaves a gaping, unanswered question. It writes in the report, “The [Donetsk Peoples Republic] officially suspended prisoner exchanges on 5 April 2015, but even since that time it has released some prisoners on an ad hoc basis. Some have been released directly to relatives who picked them up from their places of detention, while others have been released after informal negotiations, including by priests and war veterans on both sides of the conflict.”
Now why did the DPR suspend prisoner exchanges? Left unsaid in the Amnesty report is that the decision was made by Donetsk officials because of Kyiv’s failure to implement the Minsk ceasefire agreement, specifically, its obligation to join in creating working groups to oversee implementation of all the agreement’s terms. Questions have also been raised about whether Kyiv is providing genuine prisoners of the conflict for exchange or whether it is emptying its jails of common prisoners, as it did following the first ceasefire agreement in September 2014 (New York Times report).
Overall, this report by Amnesty International is an example of the bad place where a human rights agency ends up when it promotes a “plague on both your houses” line in a conflict where feigned neutrality only obscures the human rights issues at stake.
Unfortunately, Amnesty’s “both sides are to blame” message will carry a great deal of weight and will be spread far and wide. It deserves vigorous response and challenge.
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The silver that medicine dropped — four thousand years of clinical use, four decades to erase.
Colloidal Silver — First Edition, 2026, Paperback
Lies are Unbekoming | October 16, 2026
Silver was medicine. Not alternative medicine. Not folk medicine. Medicine. In surgery. In obstetrics. In the burn ward. In water treatment. In the household medicine chest. Every physician before 1938 knew this.
By the 1870s, silver nitrate was standard in surgical wound care across the leading hospitals of Britain, Germany, and the United States. Colloidal silver preparations — Collargol, Argyrol, Protargol — entered European and American practice through the 1890s and early 1900s and became standard antiseptics in military field medicine. By the time Fleming grew his first penicillin mould in 1928, silver was the first-line antimicrobial of the Western pharmacopoeia. The Lancet and the British Medical Journal carried the clinical reports in volume. The practice ran continuously through the Victorian era, the Edwardian era, the First World War, the interwar period. By 1980, almost all of it was gone.
What has not been treated at book length, until now, is how a four-thousand-year clinical record disappeared from mainstream medicine within four decades of the Flexner Report — and what the honest account of silver looks like once that record is reassembled.
Colloidal Silver reconstructs the pre-1938 record from The Lancet, the British Medical Journal, and the primary literature of the era; recovers Robert Becker’s bioelectric framework from the regeneration research the pharmaceutical model buried; and places silver inside a practical terrain-paradigm guide to its current place — in water, on the body, inside the body, and in the chronic conditions where antibiotics have failed. … continue
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- Israel keeps Palestinians struggling just to survive–Daily Update
- Israeli firm used online ads to run vast spy operation, researchers say
- No, the world zionist movement is not an antisemitic conspiracy theory
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study Suggests Large Regions Of The Pacific Ocean Have Been Cooling For The Last 80 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
- Green Energy Debacle: German Expert Professor Fritz Vahrenholt Warns Of Severe Economic And Social Consequences
- Two More Paleo Reconstructions Affirm Meters-Higher Sea Levels Across Ireland, Brazil 7000-6000 Years Ago
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
