Israel should be punished with EU-wide sanctions if it goes ahead with its planned annexation of further Palestinian territory, the World Council of Churches has said in a letter to the foreign ministers of the 27-country block.

"The EU must surely suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement," said the umbrella body in reference to the 1995 contract. The deal, which has made the EU Israel's largest trading partner, became a major bone of contention since the 2009 assault on Gaza in which the Israeli military killed at least 1,383 Palestinians, including 333 children.

Urging the EU not to make exceptions for Israel, the council said that the body should apply sanctions on Israel "at least commensurate with those adopted by the EU in response to Russia's annexation of Crimea."


In its response to Moscow's annexation of Crimea in 2014, the EU blacklisted hundreds of Russian individuals and firms, subjecting them to entry bans and freezing of EU properties. Critics often point to this disparity to argue that the block is unwilling to uphold its own laws when it comes to Israel.

"The unilateral annexation of yet more of the territory that remains to Palestinians cannot lead to justice or to peace, but only to greater injustice," wrote the body, which was established in 1948 with 350 member churches and 500,000 followers among them.

Turkey has launched new military operation Claw-Tiger in the northern Iraqi region of Haftanin against forces of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and "other terrorist elements", the Defence Ministry said on Wednesday.

"#Operation Claw-Tiger is being carried out as part of our legitimate defense rights arising from international law oriented against the PKK and other terrorist elements that have recently attempted increased harassment and attacks on our police station and base areas," the ministry said, as cited by the Anadolu news agency.


According to the ministry, Turkish forces have already entered Haftanin, and are supported by the Air Force, ATAK helicopters, UAVs and unmanned combat aerial vehicles.

Dolores Cahill promised to 'debunk' pandemic in interview with alt-right activist

A University College Dublin (UCD) professor, who chairs the Eurosceptic Irish Freedom Party, has been asked to resign from a leading European Union scientific committee over online claims she made about the Covid-19 pandemic.

In an hour-long interview with a popular alt-right activist on May 10th, which has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times, Prof Dolores Cahill promised to "debunk the narrative" of the pandemic.

Many of them also voted to attack Iraq and Syria, and their party was the first to bring in discriminatory immigration controls. Why is Labour's stance on race so confused and contradictory?

Labour leader Keir Starmer and his deputy Angela Rayner had themselves photographed "taking the knee" in their office to remember George Floyd, killed by the Minneapolis Police, in the gesture that has been adopted by the Black Lives Matter protests. Afterwards, Labour's MPs knelt outside Parliament. The London and Tower Hamlets Mayors, Sadiq Khan and John Biggs made their own contribution to the commemoration by having the statue of slave trader Robert Milligan removed from the West India Docks he built.

The performance is an insight into Labour's confused stance on race. On the one hand, the party thinks it "owns" the black vote and can put pressure on the government over its racist positions. On the other, Labour's own record is marked by race discrimination.

When Jamaican immigrants first arrived in Britain on the SS Empire Windrush in 1948, Colonial Secretary Arthur Creech Jones told the Cabinet it was a problem that would have to be dealt with. It was the beginning of a long history of race discrimination. In 1968, it was Harold Wilson's Labour government that first brought in race-based immigration controls, when it refused entry to Commonwealth citizens who didn't have a grandparent born in Britain.

North Korea on Tuesday demolished an inter-Korean liaison office in a town on the border with South Korea in an escalation of tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

The North Korean state news agency, KCNA, reported Tuesday that the office was "completely ruined."

South Korea's vice unification minister, Suh Ho, who co-headed the liaison office, said the incident was "unprecedented in inter-Korean relations," calling it "a nonsensical act that should have not happened."

"We express deep regret and strongly protest against it," Suh said.

One of the most disturbing aspects of American foreign policy since 9/11 has been the assumption that decisions made by the United States are binding on the rest of the world, best exemplified by President George W. Bush's warning that "there was a new sheriff in town." Apart from time of war, no other nation has ever sought to prevent other nations from trading with each other, nor has any government sought to punish foreigners using sanctions with the cynical arrogance demonstrated by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The United States uniquely seeks to penalize other sovereign countries for alleged crimes that did not occur in the U.S. and that did not involve American citizens, while also insisting that all nations must comply with whatever penalties are meted out by Washington. At the same time, it demonstrates its own hypocrisy by claiming sovereign immunity whenever foreigners or even American citizens seek to use the courts to hold it accountable for its many crimes.

The conceit by the United States that it is the acknowledged judge, jury and executioner in policing the international community began in the post-World War 2 environment, when hubristic American presidents began referring to themselves as "leaders of the free world." This pretense received legislative and judicial backing with passage of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1987 (ATA) as amended in 1992 plus subsequent related legislation, to include the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act of 2016 (JASTA). The body of legislation can be used to obtain civil judgments against alleged terrorists for attacks carried out anywhere in the world and can be employed to punish governments, international organizations and even corporations that are perceived to be supportive of terrorists, even indirectly or unknowingly. Plaintiffs are able to sue for injuries to their "person, property, or business" and have ten years to bring a claim.

Would be emperor Donald Trump has announced the 'Caesar Syrian Civilian Protection Act', to tighten the genocidal siege on the Syrian people. Without a hint of irony, this new edict imposes even more serious obstacles to the Syrian people getting access to energy, food and medicines, while claiming its purpose is to 'protect' those same people.

However the move comes as (1) a shrinking US military presence faces resistance attacks in both Syria and Iraq, (2) Washington's allies are abandoning the US-led 'coalition' in Iraq, (3) Trump has undermined his local allies in Lebanon and Iraq, by threats and economic turmoil, (4) US open support for further ethnic cleansing in Palestine has helped drive the international image of Apartheid Israel to an all-time low, (5) European states have serious tensions with Washington over US-driven economic wars on Iran, Russia and China, and (6) US allies including the UAE and Kuwait are re-establishing their ties with Damascus.

"Revolutions are often seen as spontaneous. It looks like people just went into the street. But it's the result of months or years of preparation. It is very boring until you reach a certain point, where you can organize mass demonstrations or strikes. If it is carefully planned, by the time they start, everything is over in a matter of weeks." Foreign Policy Journal

Does anyone believe the nationwide riots and looting are a spontaneous reaction to the killing of George Floyd?

It's all too coordinated, too widespread, and too much in-sync with the media narrative that applauds the "mainly peaceful protests" while ignoring the vast destruction to cities across the country. What's that all about? Do the instigators of these demonstrations want to see our cities reduced to urban wastelands where street gangs and Antifa thugs impose their own harsh justice? That's where this is headed, isn't it?

It turns out that the BBC really does believe that God is an Englishman. When the simple impossibility of the official story on the Skripals finally overwhelmed the dramatists, they resorted to Divine Intervention for an explanation - as propagandists have done for millennia.

This particular piece of script from Episode 2 of The Salisbury Poisonings deserves an induction in the Propaganda Hall of Fame:

Porton Down Man: I've got the reports from the Bailey house

Public Health Woman: Tell me, how many hits?

Porton Down Man: It was found in almost every room of the house. Kitchen, bathroom, living room, bedrooms. It was even on the light switches. We found it in the family car too. But his wife and children haven't been affected. I like to think of myself as a man of science, but the only word for that is a miracle.

Well, it certainly would be a miracle that the family lived for a week in the house without touching a light switch. But miracle is not really the "only word for that". Nonsense is a good word. Bullshit is a ruder version. Lie is entirely appropriate in these circumstances.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation helped negotiate who would score a $100 Billion government-backed contact tracing contract in August 2019 — six months before the 'pandemic' arrived in the United States and four months before it swept through China. (Listen below)

The shocking revelations were unveiled on the Thomas Paine Podcast and the Moore Paine Show on Patreon by the two investigators who blew the whistle on the massive Clinton Foundation tax fraud during a Congressional hearing in 2018. John Moynihan and Larry Doyle testified in Congress, detailing the fraud and schemes utilized by the Clinton's to avoid paying up to $2.5 BILLION in federal taxes.

The investigative duo, in their first interview since that bombshell Congressional testimony, revealed to Paine that representatives from the Gates Foundation met with U.S. Congressman Bobby L. Rush at a sit down in Rwanda, East Africa in mid August 2019 to hash out who would score the windfall from a government contact tracing program. And just last month — nine months after the meetings with the Gates Foundation in Rwanda — Rush, a Democrat from Illinois, introduced the $100 BILLION H.R. 6666, the COVID-19 Testing, Reaching and Contacting Everyone (TRACE) Act.