Update, 2 August: Israel acknowledges soldier is dead

On Saturday evening, the Israeli army stated that Hadar Goldin, the soldier it claimed Hamas had captured on Friday morning, is dead:

IDF ✔
@IDFSpokesperson
A special IDF committee has concluded that Lt. Hadar Goldin was killed in combat in Gaza on Friday. May his memory be a blessing.

It was on the pretext of searching for the missing soldier that Israel slaughtered at least 110 of people in the southern Gaza town of Rafah since Friday morning, destroying what was supposed to be a 72-hour humanitarian ceasefire. But the toll is rising as more bodies are found.

"Such was the savagery of Israel's bombardment in Rafah, such was the quantity of dead bodies, that there was simply no other option but to use vegetable refrigerators as makeshift morgues," journalist Mohammed Omer, who hails from Rafah, reports.

In one such freezer, Omer saw "the corpses of children, young men and women lying on top of one another, soaked in blood. Many were impossible to identify and only a few have been placed in white burial shrouds."

One wonders whether US President Barack Obama will now retract his hasty statement - no doubt based on misinformation from Israel - blaming Hamas for capturing the soldier and demanding that he be "unconditionally" released.

Now that Israel has, like Hamas, concluded that Goldin is dead, the question remains whether someone in the Israeli army gave the order to shell Rafah to kill him and prevent Hamas taking a live prisoner.

Israel is strong, mighty, invincible. Israel has truckloads of nuclear weapons. Israel has cluster bombs, DIME munitions, white phosphorous, and other illegal or experimental weapons with which it can kill and maim as many Palestinian civilians as it likes.
Israel is especially proficient at mass-murdering children. Israel constantly reminds us that it can exercise the "Samson option" and drop nuclear weapons on the capitals of Europe and the Middle East. Israel has even colonized America, the world's most powerful nation, exacting billions of dollars a year in tribute. What a stunningly prepotent entity! The world stands in awe of the great and terrible Israel.

That, at least, is what the Israelis would have us believe.

But it is just an illusion. Israel is not behaving like a confidently powerful nation. Instead, it is desperately lashing out like a cornered rat in the final throes of rabies.

Israel's genocide against the people of Gaza is sparking a seismic shift in world public opinion. Former New York Times journalist Philip Weiss, a noted Jewish critic of Israel, recently wrote: "There are more signs today that what the Israeli assault on Gaza in 2008-2009 did for the left, the latest assault is doing for the mainstream: solidifying a perception that Israeli leadership has lost its moorings, opening the floodgates of criticism."



© Roman Boed/Wikipedia CommonsA makeshift memorial at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, Netherlands for victims of flight MH17.

"Recent history has repeatedly proven that nothing said by Washington and its officials should be accepted at face value. No other government in the world has been implicated in so many egregious lies as the United States."
- Bill Van Auken, "US lies and hypocrisy on Gaza and Ukraine", World Socialist Web Site

"Mendaci neque quum vera dicit, creditor."
- Cicero ("A liar is not to be believed even when he speaks the truth.")

Without a shred of public evidence to support their claim that Moscow was involved in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, the United States and Europe have levied a new round of sanctions on Russia. The sanctions, which are designed to restrict Russia's access to both capital and technology, will be imposed as soon as August 1, despite the fact that Moscow has repeatedly denied either involvement in the incident or of providing material support for the militants fighting in east Ukraine.

Not surprisingly, Russia will not be given a chance to defend itself in court or present its case before an independent tribunal. Due process and the presumption of innocence are breezily jettisoned whenever US interests are involved. Instead, Washington will act as judge, jury and lord high executioner arbitrarily imposing penalties on the country that has provided hard evidence of what actually transpired prior to the crash using data it compiled from radar and satellite imagery. In contrast, the US hasn't lifted a finger to help the investigation even though it has the most advanced, state-of-the-art surveillance systems in the world and even though it had a satellite - capable of reading a license plate from outer space - hovering directly overhead at the time the aircraft blew up. And here's something else to consider from blogger Moon of Alabama:

"Pentagon officials told CNN (on Tuesday) that the Ukrainian government fired three ballistic missiles towards the federalists during the last 48 hours." (Moon of Alabama)

If the Pentagon picked up the ballistic missile launches on their radar, they certainly saw the surface-to-air missiles that brought down MH17. Case closed.

Al-Shifa hospital has received a phone call telling them a building of the hospital will be bombed.

At 16:30, the hospital received a call from an unlisted number, stating a building needed to be evacuated immediately.

The building is being used for overflow patients, and is directly across the road from the main hospital building. It is part of the hospital site, but building work has yet to be completed.

The hospital is now in the process of evacuating all staff and patients inside.

"I'd like to say that Israel's threats to bomb Gaza's largest hospital have reached a new low, but in light of its relentless atrocities and civilian massacres over the last 25 days, it's hardly unexpected," stated Joe Catron, U.S. International Solidarity Movement (ISM) activist now in al-Shifa hospital.

Washington-- As lawmakers on Capitol Hill scrambled to approve increased military funding for Israel this week, a little-noted federal agency across town prepared to spend as much as $84 million to compensate an American company for losses sustained in the Israeli bombardment of a Gaza power plant.

The money would come from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, which helps U.S. companies expand business abroad in ways that, to quote OPIC's website, "help solve critical development challenges and in doing so, [it] advances U.S. foreign policy." The agency does all this in part by offering insurance policies designed to protect companies from political risk, a broad term that includes "war, civil strife, coups," and "terrorism."

An OPIC spokesman told The Huffington Post on Tuesday that a "U.S. investor in the power plant whose investment is covered by OPIC political risk insurance ... notified OPIC that the facility in question has been damaged."

That investor is likely Morganti Development LLC, a Delaware-based corporation that owns a stake in the only power plant in the Gaza Strip. As of Wednesday, OPIC said the company had yet to file a claim for the losses.

The Huffington Post was not able to contact Morganti Development LLC directly, and a representative for Morganti Group Inc., an affiliated company, did not respond to a request for comment.

Given his background, what American Jewish leader Henry Siegman has to say about Israel's founding in 1948 through the current assault on Gaza may surprise you. From 1978 to 1994, Siegman served as executive director of the American Jewish Congress, long described as one of the nation's "big three" Jewish organizations along with the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League. Born in Germany three years before the Nazis came to power in 1933, Siegman's family eventually moved to the United States. His father was a leader of the European Zionist movement that pushed for the creation of a Jewish state. In New York, Siegman studied the religion and was ordained as an Orthodox rabbi by Yeshiva Torah Vodaas, later becoming head of the Synagogue Council of America. After his time at the American Jewish Congress, Siegman became a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He now serves as president of the U.S./Middle East Project. In the first of our two-part interview, Siegman discusses the assault on Gaza, the myths surrounding Israel's founding in 1948, and his own background as a German-Jewish refugee who fled Nazi occupation to later become a leading American Jewish voice and now vocal critic of Israel's policies in the Occupied Territories.

"When one thinks that this is what is necessary for Israel to survive, that the Zionist dream is based on the repeated slaughter of innocents on a scale that we're watching these days on television, that is really a profound, profound crisis - and should be a profound crisis in the thinking of all of us who were committed to the establishment of the state and to its success," Siegman says. Responding to Israel's U.S.-backed claim that its assault on Gaza is necessary because no country would tolerate the rocket fire from militants in Gaza, Siegman says: "What undermines this principle is that no country and no people would live the way that Gazans have been made to live. ... The question of the morality of Israel's action depends, in the first instance, on the question, couldn't Israel be doing something [to prevent] this disaster that is playing out now, in terms of the destruction of human life? Couldn't they have done something that did not require that cost? And the answer is, sure, they could have ended the occupation."

Natixis Chief Executive Officer Laurent Mignon said in an interview with Bloomberg Television today in Paris the French investment bank is cutting its business with Russian clients
Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc, Britain's largest state-owned lender, joined European banks, including Natixis SA in cutting lending to Russian companies amid fresh sanctions over Ukraine, Bloomberg reported on Friday.

Total exposure to Russian companies is 2.1 billion pounds ($3.5 billion) as "limits have been cut and credit restrictions introduced," RBS said in its earnings statement on its website. The bank's balance sheet exposure to euro-region periphery countries was reduced by 4% to 40.3 billion pounds in the first half of the year, it said.

The European Union this week stepped up economic pressure on Russia over its support for separatists in Ukraine and said it would prohibit Russian state-owned banks from selling shares or bonds in the world's main capital markets in an effort to force Moscow to end support for separatists in eastern Ukraine. The U.S. tightened sanctions earlier this month.

Russian companies have relied on funding from Europe and the U.S. and will need to find a replacement to support growth, said Vladimir Osakovsky, an economist at Bank of America Corp.

Russia's Defense Ministry will hold drills for reservists in all of the country's military commands in August-October. Measures to improve reservists' qualification were included in the Armed Forces training plan for 2014 put together last November.

"A number of citizens will be called up for reservist military training, which will see them receiving additional practice in military occupational specialties they obtained during their service in the Armed Forces," Defense Ministry press-service said.

The reservists will upgrade their skills in "main military specialties" directly within the Russian army's units, the press-service added.

The ministry stressed that the decision to hold the drills for part-time servicemen isn't newly made as it was planned in November 2013.

The military plans to train signalers, missilemen, bombardiers, mechanized infantrymen as well as specialists for the Navy's coastal forces, pontoon bridge, logistical support, rail and engineering units.

Abusive treatment and rampant victimization of whistleblowers has created a climate in which large segments of defence and health workers would be afraid to report departmental malfeasance, the powerful all-party Public Accounts Committee has revealed.

The report, issued on Friday, said that one in three civil servants didn't know how to raise concerns under the Whitehall code, and warned that fears of punishment would deter employees from exposing wrongdoing.

The statements come following a series of high-profile malpractices exposed by whistleblowers in the public sector, including the Mid-Staffordshire NHS scandal, in which over 1,000 patients died as a result of poor care and mismanagement.

The report also accuses the government of refusing to implement measures that protect whistleblowers, with committee chair Margaret Hodge claiming that ministers were failing to protect the public interest.

"Far too often, whistleblowers have been shockingly treated, and departments have sometimes failed to protect some whistleblowers from being victimised" she said.

A Republican lawmaker renewed his call for the release of 28 redacted pages from the investigative report into the 9/11 terrorist attacks - which a left-wing fringe group claims implicates the British monarchy.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) appeared Wednesday on the Glenn Beck Program to discuss the excerpt, which he and two other current lawmakers and one former lawmaker were permitted to read earlier this year.

The Tea Party-backed freshman lawmaker, who was one of five House Republicans who voted against authorizing Speaker John Boehner to sue President Barack Obama, posted video earlier this month from a news conference on those classified portions of the "Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001."

"It is sort of shocking when you read it," Massie told reporters. "As I read it, we all had our own experience, I had to stop every couple of pages and absorb and try to rearrange my understanding of history for the past 13 years and the years leading up to that. It challenges you to rethink everything."