If The International Criminal Court Comes After Us, Israel Or Other U.S. Allies, We Will Not Sit Quietly, Say The Biggest Warmongers On The Planet

Palestinian Women Are Among The Most Educated In The Middle East.

Although the conflict in Palestine often grabs headlines, day to day functions, like girls’ education in Palestine, are important as well.
According to The Brookings Institute, “Education, especially for girls and women, is one of the most highly leveraged investments that a developing country can make in its future.”
With its 25% rate of poverty and 60% rate of youth unemployment in conflict zones like Gaza, Palestine has an opportunity for growth and development.
Investing in girls’ education could help kick-start that process.
Girls’ education in Palestine can improve local young girls’ futures and the future of the whole region.

Palestinian women are among the most educated in the Middle East.
They have a 94% literacy rate and go to primary school just as often as boys do.
Palestinian girls consistently outscore their male peers in Tawhiji testing.
In the 2006 school year, 14,064 more Palestinian women were enrolled in university than Palestinian men.
Compared to the situations for women in Yemen, Egypt or Afghanistan, girls’ education in Palestine is thriving.

Attacks from Israel often disrupts the educational infrastructure of Palestine.
Schools are damaged by rockets and bombs in volatile areas like the Gaza Strip and West Bank (both illegally occupied by Israel), limiting all children’s access to education.
In 2014, in the Gaza Strip alone the education of 475,000 students was affected by this destruction.
Palestinian schools in Israeli territory are regularly underserved, with overcrowded classrooms and lower budgets.
( Lydia Cardwell, 21.06.2018 )  ..  borgenproject.org

An estimated 85,000 children under the age of five may have died from acute malnutrition in three years of war in Yemen.
The number is equivalent to the entire under-five population in the UK’s second largest city of Birmingham.
The UN warned that up to 14 million Yemenis are on the brink of famine.
Yemen has been devastated by the conflict.
Fighting escalated in 2015 when a Saudi-led coalition (which includes the U.S. and the UK) launched an air campaign against the Houthi rebel movement which had forced President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi to flee abroad.
At least 6,800 civilians have been killed and 10,700 injured in the war, according to the UN.
The fighting and a partial blockade by the coalition have also left 22 million people in need of humanitarian aid, created the world’s largest food security emergency, and led to a cholera outbreak that has affected 1.2 million people.
( BBC News, 21.11.2018 )  ..  bbc.co.uk

Study Finds 4.5 Million UK Children Living In Poverty.

More than 14 million people, including 4.5 million children, are living below the breadline, with more than half trapped in poverty for years, according to a new measure aimed at providing the most sophisticated analysis yet of material disadvantage in the UK.
The measure seeks to forge a fresh political consensus between left and right over how to define and track poverty, with the aim of encouraging better-targeted poverty interventions, and making it easier to hold politicians to account.
It finds poverty is especially prevalent in families with at least one disabled person, single-parent families, and households where no one works or that are dependent for income on irregular or zero-hours jobs.
( Patrick Butler, 16.09.2018 )  ..  theguardian.com

Ukrainian Forces Used Cluster Munitions In Populated Areas.

Human Rights Watch said the Ukrainian government forces used cluster munitions in populated areas in Donetsk city in early October 2014.
The use of cluster munitions in populated areas violates the laws of war due to the indiscriminate nature of the weapon and may amount to war crimes.
During a week-long investigation in eastern Ukraine, Human Rights Watch documented widespread use of cluster munitions in fighting between government forces and pro-Russian rebels in more than a dozen urban and rural locations.
While it was not possible to conclusively determine responsibility for many of the attacks, the evidence points to Ukrainian government forces’ responsibility for several cluster munition attacks on Donetsk.
An employee of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was killed on October 2 in an attack on Donetsk that included use of cluster munition rockets.
( Human Rights Watch, 20.10.2014 )  ..  hrw.org

Abusers Of Children Have Found A Safe Haven.

Atop the shadow-cast hills at the northern end of the illegally-occupied West Bank in Palestine, in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish illegal settlement of Emmanuel, abusers of children have found a safe haven.
This strictly religious, poverty-stricken illegal settlement is one of eight ultra-Orthodox illegal settlements that lie outside the “Green Line”, Israel’s pre-1967 border with the Palestinian territories.
( LostMessiah, 09.08.2018 )  ..  lostmessiahdotcom.wordpress.com

What’s The Worst Way To Possibly Die?

It’s hard to imagine anything more sickening and barbaric than what is alleged to have happened to Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist for the Washington Post.
He was apparently lured to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, where he was confronted by a 15-man hit squad that had flown in from Riyadh to murder him.
But not, it is claimed, quickly.
He was dragged from the consul-general’s office to the table of a study next door.

There, for seven long, agonising minutes, Khashoggi was reportedly tortured and hacked to pieces with a bone-saw while he was still alive.
He was decapitated and had his fingers cut off one by one.
Then, the severed remains of his torso were put in 15 plastic bags and removed, to be later dissolved in acid.
Khashoggi’s ‘horrendous’ screams of pain were so loud they were heard downstairs by a witness.
The chief executioner was allegedly ‘Dr Death’ Salah Muhammad al-Tubaigy, ‘head of forensic evidence’ for the Saudi general security department.

The more we learn about this horrific murder, the more disgusting it gets.
But one thing is increasingly obvious: he wasn’t killed ‘accidentally’ during a botched interrogation, as Saudi sources are desperately trying to suggest.
The consulate witness who heard the screams was clear: ‘They came to kill him to kill him, not interrogate him.’ Of course they did.

A 15-man team of highly trained men including royal House of Saud bodyguards and intelligence officers weren’t sent from Saudi Arabia to Turkey to have a ‘little chat’ with Khashoggi.
They were sent to silence him – permanently.
And to do it in such a despicable and depraved manner that it would deter others from following his path.
( Piers Morgan, 18.10.2018 )  ..  dailymail.co.uk

We Will Sanction And Prosecute Any Company Or State That Assists The International Criminal Court With Investigations Against Americans, Says The White House National Security Advisor.
The U.S.A. has threatened to arrest and sanction judges and other officials of the International Criminal Court if it moves to charge any American who served in Afghanistan with war crimes.
White House National Security Advisor John Bolton called the Hague-based rights body “unaccountable” and “outright dangerous” to the United States, Israel and other allies, and said any probe of U.S. service members would be “an utterly unfounded, unjustifiable investigation. If the court comes after us, Israel or other US allies, we will not sit quietly.”
Bolton also said: “We will ban its judges and prosecutors from entering the United States. We will sanction their funds in the U.S. financial system, and we will prosecute them in the U.S. criminal system. We will do the same for any company or state that assists an ICC investigation of Americans.”
Bolton made the comments in a speech in Washington to the Federalist Society, a powerful association of legal conservatives.
 ( 11.09.2018 )  ..  france24.com

We Are Stealing From Our Own Future.

We demand more, you have heard the aspiring tyrant’s words that promise more.
Political promises evaporate when there is insufficient energy to support them.
The notion of “Saudi America” is reassuring, but the facts are not.
Despite the rhetoric and posturing, reality cannot be ignored.
The USA produces around 12+ million barrels of oil a day, but uses 0ver 19 million barrels a day (2016).

This imbalance is not going to change, despite collective belief to the contrary.
The USA cannot produce sufficient oil to sustain itself.
Price fluctuations and the ebb and flow of gluts should be ignored.
If the cost of oil rises to a level that sustains the producers, users can’t afford to buy it.
If it falls, oil producers can’t afford to extract it.

This is the economic vice that is inexorably crushing the global industrial system as oil supplies decline.
As surplus energy falls away, so does real income.
We have substituted debt for income and caused that debt to grow to mask the reality of our situation.
We are stealing from our own future and from generations unborn to stay solvent.
It might be called intergenerational larceny.

When our great grandchildren arrive they will find nothing left for them to burn.
We are already in the phase of expending too much energy to get energy, which is why real income has been static for 30 years.
We live in an energy economy, not a money economy.
We cannot devote our commercial existence to the businesses of finding new sources of energy.
( Norman Pagett, 17.07.2018 )