Weapons Made In Britain Linked To Countless War Crimes And Civilian Massacres In Yemen

A Fake Peace Plan By The U.S. And Europe To Deceive Russia.

Early last year (2022), when Petro Poroshenko stated publicly that the post-coup regime in Kyiv had no intention of abiding by diplomatic commitments it made in 2014/15 to a peaceful settlement of the Ukraine crisis, a few eyebrows arched, but not over many.
It was another matter when, in early December 2022, Angela Merkel admitted in back-to-back interviews that the European powers were up to the same thing.

The objective of diplomatic talks in late 2014 and early 2015, the former German chancellor told Der Spiegel and Die Zeit, was not, as they had pretended, a framework for a federalised Ukraine in the cause of a lasting peace between its hostile halves: It was to deceive the Russians to give Kyiv time to prepare for a military assault on the Russian-speaking provinces in the east, whose people had refused to accept the U.S.–orchestrated coup that brought compulsively Russophobic Nazi-inflected nationalists to power in February 2014.
( Patrick Lawrence, 08.01.2023 )  ..  scheerpost.com

Ukraine Celebrate The Birthday Of A Nazi Collaborator.

Ukraine’s support for neo-Nazi groups and its attempts to officially recognise pro-Nazi legions and Nazi collaborators from World War II have been steadfastly criticised by communists and other anti-fascist groups in the region.
Kiev’s supporters in Europe and North America have, until now,  maintained a complicit silence about these manoeuvres.

However, the latest gesture by the Ukrainian parliament, cheering on the birthday of the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, has drawn sharp criticism even from neighbouring Poland, its staunch ally in the ongoing war with Russia.
On Jan. 1, 2022, a post celebrating the 114th birthday of Stepan Bandera, notorious Ukrainian far-right leader and  World War II Nazi collaborator, was tweeted from the official handle of the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian parliament.

According to reports, the tweet contained “a quote from Stepan Bandera and a photo of the Ukrainian Armed Forces chief, General Valery Zaluzhny, with a large portrait of the Nazi collaborator in the background.”
After receiving a significant amount of criticism, it was later deleted from the twitter handle of Verkhovna Rada.

On Jan. 2, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki denounced the glorification of Stepan Bandera by the Ukrainian parliament.
On the same day, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper also slammed Ukrainian authorities for celebrating and quoting an anti-Semitic Nazi collaborator.
( 06.01.2023 )  ..  consortiumnews.com

£29 Million “Reward And Recognition” Vouchers Paid To UK Civil Servants.

Data shows that 16 Government departments paid out a total of £29.57million to staff in “reward and recognition” vouchers, a third more than the previous year.
The Foreign Office spent the most, totalling £9.9million given to staff in vouchers.
The Home Office spent £6.6million, up from £2.8million, and the Department of Work and Pensions handed out £5.9million in vouchers.

The Ministry of Justice spent £4.9million on shopping and restaurant vouchers.
The Ministry of Defence, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Ministry of Health refused to provide figures for their voucher programmes.

The controversial voucher payments came despite previous Chancellor and current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak introducing a year-long pay freeze across the majority of the civil service amid the cost of living crisis, and a growing number of walkouts across the public sector over pay disputes and working conditions.
( Emma Soteriou, 29.12.2022 )  ..  lbc.co.uk

Ex-UK PM Boris Johnson Receives Donations And Is Paid For Making Speeches.

Boris Johnson has made more than £1million from giving speeches since leaving No 10, parliamentary records show.
The former prime minister was paid £754,000 for three speeches in America, India and Portugal last month (November), according to the latest register of MPs’ interests.
It comes on top of £276,000 he made from a speech in October.

The records also show he and his family have continued to receive accommodation from Tory donor Lord Bamford.
Mr Johnson registered a further £3,500 in accommodation from the JCB boss and his wife Carole for November and December.
That was in addition to the £37,000 for accommodation he had previously registered from the couple since leaving office in September 2022.

The Bamford couple donated £23,853 towards a summer wedding celebration for Mr Johnson and his wife Carrie, who married last year.
A previous entry specified it covered the cost of hiring a marquee, portable toilets, waiting staff, flowers, a South African BBQ and an ice cream van.
( BBC News, 14.12.2022 )  ..  bbc.co.uk

Two Women In Israel Accuse Prominent Rabbi Of Rape.

Through weekly protests outside Israel’s parliament, Nehama Teena has demanded an investigation into a prominent rabbi she accuses of rape and sought to break the code of silence surrounding sexual assault in the Orthodox world.
In August 2022, Teena rattled Israel’s Orthodox Jewish community with a Facebook post that accused 84-year-old rabbi Zvi Thau of raping her over several years, including when she was a minor.

Thau heads one of Jerusalem’s most influential Jewish study centres, the Har Hamor yeshiva.
He is also the spiritual head of Noam, a virulently anti-LGBTQ party that secured one parliament seat in Israel’s November 2022 elections and has struck a deal with prime minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu to support his next government.
Thau has refused to comment on the series of allegations made against him by Teena and another woman, Dorit Lang, who came forward with accusations dating back 40 years.
( AFP, 20.12.2022 )  ..  france24.com

Conflict-Related Deaths In Ukraine Before Russia’s Military Intervention.

We are told by our respective Leaders and Media that “This is Putin’s Unprovoked War on Ukraine.”
This narrative simplifies and projects the blame away from the actual root cause of the current conflict.
We are also told that this was a “Full-scale Invasion,” by Western Media while Russia called it a “Special Military Operation.”

Depending on which flavour of State and Media Propaganda you prefer to believe, will set you on a journey of confirmation bias, often leading you to a complete misunderstanding of the facts.
In this time of voluminous quantities of fast-moving and instant information, we tend to eat with our eyes by simply reading the headlines.

Our capacities for self-analysis and critical thinking are often diluted by the snappy one-liners and compressed Twitter Posts, so we don’t delve any deeper and we are left none the wiser.
But perhaps we should delve deeper and read a report published by the UNITED NATIONS HUMAN RIGHTS MONITORING MISSION IN UKRAINE.
This report spans from 2014 until 2021, and it covers in accurate detail, the loss of human life and casualties from this period.

You then have to put yourself in the shoes of Vladimir Putin, whose job it is to protect Russian Citizens and to respond to calls for assistance in times of emergency.
This is no different to the responsibilities borne by any other Leader, so why should it be different for him, and more importantly, what would you do in his situation?

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) estimates the total number of conflict-related casualties in Ukraine from 14 April 2014 to 31 December 2021 to be between 51,000 and 54,000.
Between 14,200 and 14,400 are estimated to have been killed, which included at least 3,400 civilians.
This is prior to Russia’s Military Intervention of February 24th 2022.
( Iain Muir, 20.02.2023 )  ..  scoylandtoday.online

Over 90 People Killed In The Bombing Of A Migrant Detention Centre In Yemen.

Gross violations of international law.
Missiles raining down on houses.
Kleptocrats laundering their ill-gotten gains through London and buying political influence.
Aggressive, powerful states attacking a poorer neighbour, backing separatist rebels, illegally occupying its land, dropping cluster bombs and conducting crippling cyber-attacks. Sound familiar?
This is what Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have been doing to Yemen since 2015.

It’s a conflict that has continued during Putin’s offensive in Ukraine, but with a fraction of the media scrutiny.
Unlike with Russia, there have been no recent calls for financial or even sporting sanctions on Gulf regimes from prominent British commentators or politicians.
With the war in Yemen worsening once again, the silence of Britain’s political class becomes ever louder.

The double standard has a simple explanation.
The despotic rulers of Riyadh, Dubai and Abu Dhabi (the two major emirates in the UAE) are close British allies and reliable customers of Western weaponry.
This January (2022), their jets killed over 90 people in the bombing of a migrant detention centre.

It was one of the worst atrocities of the entire Yemen war, which has been marked by countless war crimes and civilian massacres, like we are tragically now seeing in Ukraine.
Amnesty International says a missile fragment found in the detention centre wreckage showed the weapon responsible was made by Raytheon, a U.S. company with factories in Britain.
Their equipment has been repeatedly linked to atrocities in Yemen, including the bombing of a wedding.
( Phil Miller, 02.03.2022 ) ..  declassifieduk.org

The Greed Of The World’s Biggest Food Corporations.

Imagine being able to provide food, shelter, medicine and clean drinking water for the 230 million most vulnerable people on Earth, and still having a cool $2billion in spare change.
That’s the equivalent of the entire economic output of Gambia rattling around in your pocket.

The reason for this unlikely thought experiment is a new analysis showing that 20 of the world’s biggest food corporations – the largest in the grain, fertiliser, meat and dairy sectors – returned a total of $53.5billion to their shareholders in the last two financial years.

To put that into perspective, the UN estimates that it needs $51.5billion to provide life-saving support to 230 million people deemed most at risk worldwide.
What’s more, the corporations ‘earned’ these profits during a period of unprecedented turmoil – a global pandemic and full-scale war in Ukraine – when global supply chains were disrupted and millions of people went hungry.
( Davi Martins, 02.03.2023 )  ..  opendemocracy.net