SAN FRANCISCO, USA, Jan 15 2024 (IPS)* – Have you heard the one about the U.S. government wanting a “rules-based international order”?
Members of the UN Security-Council gather for a meeting on the maintenance of international peace and security in the Red Sea. 10 January 2024. Credit: UN Photo/Manuel Elías
It’s grimly laughable, but the nation’s media outlets routinely take such claims seriously and credulously. Overall, the default assumption is that top officials in Washington are reluctant to go to war, and do so only as a last resort.
The framing was typical when the New York Times just printed this sentence at the top of the front page: “The United States and a handful of its allies on Thursday carried out military strikes against more than a dozen targets in Yemen controlled by the Iranian-backed Houthi militia, U.S. officials said, in an expansion of the war in the Middle East that the Biden administration had sought to avoid for three months.”
The headquarters of the International Criminal Court in The Haque, the Netherlands- Credit: Adam Mørk.UNITED NATIONS, Jan 11 2024 (IPS)* — The continued devastation of Gaza by Israel has triggered widespread charges of war crimes, genocide, forced displacement, ethnic cleansing, starvation as a weapon of war and mass killings of civilians – over 22,000 at last count—compared to 1,200 killings by Hamas.
These accusations have prompted growing demands for intervention by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, which has remained silent while its Prosecutor Karim Khan is accused of double standards and playing politics.
The New York-based Foreign Press Association (FPA), which was scheduled to host a zoom discussion later this week, said “with more than 20,000 Palestinians dead, areas of Gaza turned to rubble, ICC prosecutor Karim Khan has yet to investigate either Israel or Hamas for the deaths, on and after 7 October– despite his exemplary hair-trigger speed against (Russian President) Vladimir Putin fo war crimes committed in Ukraine”.
Looking Beyond the Lens of Reason and Political Expediency
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Mahboob A. Khawaja
U.S. military support to Israel’s hegemonic plans to dominate the Arab world is fast assuming the ethos of facts not fiction.
PM Netanyahu wanted to flatten Gaza that his Defense Minister Gallant called them “human animals”, and another War Cabinet Extremist Minster wanted to nuke Gaza and it is obliterated by continuous bombing and destruction for over 84 days.
The unabated bombing and sadistic killings offer statistic of 21,672 people killed, some 8,800 children and 5,670 women crushed and according to the media some 8,000 children buried under rubble for the record human casualties.
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 5 2024 (IPS)* – The atrocities against Palestinians in a ruthlessly devastated Gaza — with over 21,000 mostly civilian deaths in retaliation to the killings of 1,200 inside Israel —have resurrected a longstanding question: is it time for Palestine to be recognized as a full-fledged UN member state?
A view of the General Assembly Hall as a draft resolution to grant Palestine non-Member Observer State status in the United Nations was introduced. The resolution on the status of Palestine was adopted by a vote of 138 in favour to nine against with 41 abstentions by the 193-member Assembly. 29 November 2012. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten
(UN News)* — Hospitals and other vital medical infrastructure in Gaza and the West Bank have been attacked nearly 600 times since war erupted in the enclave in response to the Hamas-led terror attack in southern Israel, the UN health agency said on Friday [].
Some 613 people have died within health facilities in the Occupied Palestinian Territory since 7 October last year – 606 in Gaza and seven in the West Bank – and more than 770 have been injured, according to latest data on healthcare attacks from the World Health Organization (WHO).
— Artificial intelligence (AI) is ripe to help resolve certain major problems in Africa, from farming to the health sector, but Senegalese expert Seydina Moussa Ndiaye is warning of a new “colonization” of the continent by this new technology if foreign companies continue to feed on African data without involving local actors.
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UN Photo/Elma Okic | The UN Global Digital Compact aims to bring together governments and industry to ensure that technology, like AI, works for all humanity.
One of 38 people members of the new UN advisory body on machine learning, Mr. Ndiaye spoke with UN News about the landscape ahead, building on his experience in helping to drive Senegal’s digital transformation in higher education, serving as an expert to the African Union in drafting the Pan-African Strategy on AI and in contributing to the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI).
The US Congress is poised to send $14.3 billion to Israeli militarism—a “genocide tax.” The atrocities are being recorded by drones and by brave Palestinian journalists targeted by the Israeli army. Over 66 journalists have been slain.
Israel fired white phosphorous shells indiscriminately over densely populated areas of Gaza in what amounts to a war crime. Human Rights Watch
26 Dec 2023 – The unstoppable Israeli U.S. armed military juggernaut continues its genocidal destruction of Gaza’s Palestinians. The onslaught includes blocking the provision of “food, water, medicine, electricity and fuel,” openly genocidal orders decreed by Netanyahu and his extreme, blood-thirsty ministers.
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 2 2024 (IPS)* –– When US President Joe Biden lambasted “the largest aerial assault,” which hit “a maternity hospital, a shopping mall and residential areas killing innocent people”, he was not talking of the devastating Israeli attacks on Gaza but criticizing the most recent Russian military assault on Ukraine.
Destruction in Gaza Strip. Credit: UNICEF/Hassan Islyeh
Biden obviously has one yardstick for the Russians and another for the Israelis –displaying sheer hypocrisy and political double standards.
(UN News)* — UN humanitarians repeated dire concerns for civilians caught up in the war in Gaza on Tuesday [], amid reports of continued Israeli bombardment of the southern towns of Deir al Balah, Khan Younis and Rafah, direct clashes on the ground and the firing of rockets overnight by Palestinian armed groups into Israel.
The latest warnings from UN relief agency for Palestinians UNRWA and the UN World Food Programme, WFP, highlighted the threat of starvation and disease in heavily built-up areas, where tens of thousands of people have fled intense bombing campaigns in the enclave’s north and centre.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 