In a campaign to improve its image abroad, the Israeli government plans to provide scholarships to hundreds of students at its seven universities in exchange for their making pro-Israel Facebook posts and tweets to foreign audiences.

The students making the posts will not reveal online that they are funded by the Israeli government, according to correspondence about the plan revealed in the Haaretz newspaper.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office, which will oversee the programme, confirmed its launch and wrote that its aim was to "strengthen Israeli public diplomacy and make it fit the changes in the means of information consumption".

The government's hand is to be invisible to the foreign audiences. Daniel Seaman, the official who has been planning the effort, wrote in a letter on 5 August to a body authorizing government projects that "the idea requires not making the role of the state stand out and therefore it is necessary to adhere to great involvement of the students themselves, without political linkage or affiliation".

Step one: But they have the vote

Start with fragmentation. When talking about Israel refer to a mythical state that existed between November 1966 and June 1967, the only period during which the majority of Palestinians living under Israeli control were NOT subject to military rule. Focus on the fact that Palestinians who became Israeli citizens have the right to vote. Not quite a right to vote for any party of their choice (various radical lists were disqualified over the years) but still, a right to participate in the elections.

In the process, ignore the 80% of the original inhabitants of the territories that became part of Israel in 1948, who have been physically excluded from exercising any civil and political rights in their homeland. Ignore all those who live under military occupation in the 1967 territories, with no right to vote in Israel and no say in the way their territories are governed by Israel (their own government has no power over land, water, roads, housing, development, population registration, and virtually everything else that is relevant to their lives).

Go back to those citizens (about 15% of all Palestinians) and assert how fortunate they are. Do not bother to read, convey, and consider their own feelings, words, analyses, politics. They have a very different opinion on the applicability of the notion of apartheid to their own situation, but why listen? Who is better qualified to speak on their behalf than you?

The BRICS summit in northeast Brazil has already made history for one key reason; the creation of the New Development Bank.

Call it the Global South antidote to that structural adjustment racket, the IMF. Over and over again, BRICS member nations and others have insisted on an institutional IMF reform that would recognize the economic weight of the Global South. Reform packages have been languishing in the US Congress since 2010. And once again they were blocked last April.

The New Development Bank will be way more democratic than the US/EU-controlled IMF. Look at the funding; a flat $10 billion contribution by each member country. This means, sooner or later, that other developing nations will also join. I have called it casino capitalism versus a productive capitalism model.

The summit agenda was humongous; the BRICS discussed trade, sustainable development strategies, macroeconomic policy, energy, finance, terrorism, climate change, regional security, drug smuggling, transnational crime, the industrialization of Africa. The BRICS are already advancing a slew of strategic multilateral projects in terms of setting up an alternative network infrastructure; for instance, the BRICS cable, currently being laid from Vladivostok to Shantou, Chennai, Cape Town and Fortaleza (where the summit took place). The BRICS cable is all about IT security, technology transfer, commodity turnover - and facilitating financial operations. Crucially, the cable bypasses the US.

While there are various questions that have already emerged from what was supposed to be Ukraine's "slam dunk" proof confirming Russian rebel involvement in today's MH-17 tragedy, perhaps one just as gaping question emerges when one looks at what is clearly an outlier flight path in today's final, and tragic, departure of the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777.

Perhaps the best visualization of what the issue is, comes from Vagelis Karmiros who has collated all the recent MH-17 flight paths as tracked by Flightaware and shows that while all ten most recent paths pass safely well south of the Donetsk region, and cross the zone above the Sea of Azov, it was only today's tragic flight that passed straight overhead Donetsk.

There's something deeply ugly, verging on mendacious, about this eye-witness account of the strike against four children on Gaza's beach by William Booth in the Washington Post. It begins with what appears to be context but is, in fact, simply an effort to deflect criticism from Israel and blame the victims.

He starts with this: "It is not unusual for militants to launch rockets from sites near my hotel."

So had rockets been launched from the spot where the children were killed? Here's the account of veteran Guardian/Observer correspondent Peter Beaumont:

The building that was hit was just a shipping container next to where one of the kids' father keeps his boat and stores fishing nets. The kids were just playing hide and seek there. They shoot missiles (against Israel) from this neighborhood but none from that location.

So how is Booth's introduction relevant in any way to the story? Yes, militants have fired rockets from the neighbourhood (after all, from where else but "neighbourhoods" are they likely to fire rockets in one of the most densely populated places on earth). But, as Beaumont points out, they were not being fired from the area that was attacked by Israel.

Israel is supposedly using precision missiles. So this was deliberate targeting of that area, an open area from which no rockets had been fired and where children regularly play. If Booth believes that rockets fired from the general area somehow justify Israel's missile strikes on the children (and if not, why mention it?), then why the hell is he staying in the al-Deira hotel, which is presumably as likely to be hit as the harbour where the children play?

There is also something unpleasant in his style of writing here. Note this line as the injured children are brought to his hotel.

Two young terrified kids were bleeding and injured, and they were quickly bandaged on the floor of the terrace, where guests usually eat skewers of grilled chicken, suck on water pipes and watch the sun go down.

That incidental reference to the chicken and water pipes is added for colour. It's a journalistic technique we use when there's not much happening and you want to set a scene to draw the reader into the story. But here it's entirely unnecessary. The action - the bleeding children and the dead bodies nearby - are what will draw the reader in, as any rookie journalist would know. So when I see Booth pausing from his description to talk about how the guests entertain themselves in the evenings, I sense - both as a journalist and a reader - that his attention is not fully on the events at hand.

I'd like to believe this is his way of responding to the shock of the events he's just witnessed. But I suspect something else is at work here, something revealing about the business of journalism.

Most of the time, we write not for ourselves or our readers but for our editors - in short to keep our jobs. Here Booth was called on to stop being the careerist and connect with his humanity. That, rare though it is in journalism, was what the moment required: to see, really see the desperate, terrified little boys in front of him. Instead, all he could think about was technique and what his editors might want.

Jonathan Cook, based in Nazareth, Israel is a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books)

Yesterday (7/16/14) the New York Times posted its first account of the Israeli strike that killed four young Palestinians on a beach in Gaza. The headline looked like this:
That headline appropriately conveys the horrors witnessed and documented by the Times reporters.

But at some point - around 9:00 pm, according to the website Newsdiffs - the headline was changed to the version that appears on the front page of the New York Times today: "Boys Drawn to Gaza Beach, and Into Center of Mideast Strife."
Was there something wrong with noting in the headline that the boys were killed? Do readers learn more being told they were "drawn into strife"?

The latest round of unilateral US sanctions against Russia will not affect the operations of international payment systems Visa and MasterCard in the country, the world's top two credit and debit card companies said.

"The new US sanctions package does not affect Visa operations in Russia. We are continuing to service transactions in a normal way," a spokesman for Visa said on Thursday.

MasterCard told Itar-Tass that the sanctions were "applied to certain banks' access to the US capital market and do not affect our business."

Previous rounds of sanctions forbid the companies from dealing with Bank Rossiya and later SMP, Sobinbank and InvestCapitalbank. In those instances, the banks saw their card services stop with virtually no warning.

In contrast, the fresh sanctions targeting Gazprombank and Vnesheconombank (VEB), which helped finance the Sochi Winter Olympics, will be preventing the banks from raising medium and long-term financing from US institutions. None of the banks' assets, however, will be frozen.

Gazprombank, Russia's third largest bank by assets, is closely associated with natural-gas giant Gazprom.

Welcome to Las Vegas, where the 'Entertainment Capital of the World' is also the wiretapping capital of the country, according to a new report unveiling the number of wiretap authorizations by law enforcement in each state.

The Administrative Office of US Courts (AO) released its annual report to Congress this week, highlighting intercepted wire, oral, or electronic communications. The Wiretap Report 2013 is a compilation of data provided by federal and state officials on orders authorizing or approving the various forms of wiretapping for the calendar year. It does not cover interceptions regulated by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, the type of surveillance used by the National Security Agency and made famous by documents leaked by former contractor Edward Snowden.

According to the report, the number of federal and state wiretaps increased five percent between 2012 and 2013, for a total of 3,576 authorizations last year. Of those, about 40 percent were approved by federal judges, with the rest approved by courts at the state level.

When it came to the main offense cited in each wiretap authorization request, 87 percent were for criminal drug-related offenses, followed by "other major offenses" - which includes smuggling and money laundering - at 3.9 percent, and homicide and assault at 3.7 percent.

A well-known Israeli politician and parliament member has branded Palestinians as terrorists, saying mothers of all Palestinians should also be killed during the ongoing Israeli assault on the besieged Gaza Strip, Daily Sabah reported.

Ayelet Shaked of the ultra-nationalist Jewish Home party called for the slaughter of Palestinian mothers who give birth to "little snakes."

"They have to die and their houses should be demolished so that they cannot bear any more terrorists," Shaked said, adding, "They are all our enemies and their blood should be on our hands. This also applies to the mothers of the dead terrorists."

The remarks are considered as a call for genocide as she declared that all Palestinians are Israel's enemies and must be killed.

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has lashed out at the Gaza military operation, urging Israel to cease its offensive.

Speaking in his weekly phone-in program on radio LBC, Clegg said that Israel had gone too far in its attacks after four Palestinian children were killed on a beach by Israeli shells.

He also accused Israel of imposing a "disproportionate form of collective punishment" on to Gaza citizens, which would lead to "truly unimaginable" and "unacceptable" humanitarian crisis.

The statements echo the guidelines set out by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to define breaches of international law.

In a paper defining international conventions during war, the ICRC classifies collective punishment as a war crime, as it constitutes 'cruel treatment'.