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Heart - Black

Israeli naval ship purposefully targets and bombs Palestinian children playing on Gaza beach, killing four

William Booth
The Washington Post
Wed, 16 Jul 2014 10:39 UTC
Israeli targets children at the beach
© Reuters
A man on a beach in Gaza City carries a child in the aftermath of Israeli shelling
It is not unusual for militants to launch rockets from sites near my hotel. Israeli missiles have also landed pretty close to Al Deira, an old red stucco inn with a large terrace overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. Just a few hundred yards down the beach is the fishing harbor.

I had just returned to the hotel to type up some notes and file inserts on the day's news when there was a large explosion on the quay at the port, a little after 4'o clock in the afternoon.

We could smell the charge. I wondered: Did Hamas just fire a rocket? But it was the sound of an incoming missile. We saw a small fisherman's shack on the quay, churning with gray smoke.

Then we saw a gang of kids running from the shack, down the breakwater and onto the sand, hurtling toward Al Deira. A couple of waiters, the cook and a few journalists starting waving at them. Run here! Then a second missile exploded on the beach right behind them.

The staff were yelling, "They're hurt!"

Comment: The Guardian reports about the same event:
Journalists heard two loud explosions outside the Gaza City hotel, before children were pulled into the restaurant area for treatment.

A journalist who saw the incident said some of the children who survived were running away when another shell seemed to be aimed at them.


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Gold Seal

The return of George Orwell and Big Brother's war on Palestine, Ukraine and the truth

John Pilger
Independent Australia
Fri, 11 Jul 2014 04:19 UTC
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The other night, I saw George Orwells's Nineteen Eighty-Four performed on the London stage.

Although crying out for a contemporary interpretation, Orwell's warning about the future was presented as a period piece - remote, unthreatening, almost reassuring. It was as if Edward Snowden had revealed nothing, Big Brother was not now a digital eavesdropper and Orwell himself had never said:
'... to be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.'
Acclaimed by critics, the skilful production was a measure of our cultural and political times. When the lights came up, people were already on their way out. They seemed unmoved, or perhaps other distractions beckoned.

"What a mindfuck," said a young woman, lighting up her phone.

As advanced societies are de-politicised, the changes are both subtle and spectacular.

In everyday discourse, political language is turned on its head, as Orwell prophesised in 1984. 'Democracy' is now a rhetorical device. Peace is 'perpetual war'. 'Global' is imperial. The once hopeful concept of 'reform' now means regression, even destruction. 'Austerity' is the imposition of extreme capitalism on the poor and the gift of socialism for the rich - an ingenious system under which the majority service the debts of the few.
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Life Preserver

Oil on troubled waters: China removes disputed China Sea oil rig


RIA Novosti
Wed, 16 Jul 2014 09:02 UTC
Chinese oil platform
© REUTERS/ Martin Petty
Vietnamese and chineese coastguards thereabouts Haiyang Shiyou 981 platform
China has begun the withdrawal of its oil platform from the South China Sea area that has caused a dispute with Vietnam and mass anti-China protests in Hanoi, China's Foreign Ministry announced on its website and Vietnamese media reported Wednesday.

"China's Haiyang Shiyou 981 platform, which has been drilling in waters near the Xisha Islands [Paracel Islands] since May 2, successfully completed the work on July 15. Based on the geological data attained, corresponding companies will determine the next work plan," China's Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hong Lei said in a statement.

Relations between China and Vietnam worsened when the oil rig arrived in waters near the Paracel Islands at the beginning of May, and Vietnam sent its ships to prevent the platform installation in what it considers its exclusive economic zone, while Beijing claims the area is part of its maritime belt. Since then, more than 1,000 clashes between Chinese and Vietnamese vessels have taken place.
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Star of David

Latest Gaza bombardment: What you're not being told


SCG News
Tue, 15 Jul 2014 17:55 UTC
Image
The corporate media isn't just distorting the facts on the Gaza assault, they're flat out covering them up.

On July 7, 2014 Israel began a massive assault on the Gaza strip of Palestine. In the first week alone Israel dropped over 400 tons of bombs, killing over 130 Palestinians. Most were civilians, about half of them were women and children. By the time you are watching the the number will be higher.

Israel's official justification for this wholesale slaughter: the murder of three Israeli teenagers which Israel blames on Hamas. That's not the real reason. First of all Israel has not produced one single piece of evidence implicating Hamas or even a Palestinian in the murders, and in fact the the evidence we do have indicates that that murderers were Israeli. You see on Tuesday July 1st, The Jerusalem Post released the audio of the kidnapped teen's distress call to police, and in that call the kidnappers can be heard telling the boys to put their heads down in HEBREW. According to the Jerusalem Post prior to being leaked to the public this audio was being held under a gag order by the Israeli government.


Comment: Normal people tend to read into the intentions - or what they think are the intentions - of psychopaths in the hope of making coherent sense out of their insanity.

Doing this for gas, while outrageous, at least makes sense.

Thing is though, as Israeli author Miko Peled explained in last week's SOTT Talk Radio show, Israel already effectively owns whatever resources are in or near the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It has been diverting Palestinians' water since forever. It has long considered the whole of Palestine to be Israeli-owned. The Palestinian government doesn't even control its own financial budget, making it more impotent than city councils in Israel proper. So Israel is not doing this with a view to 'securing gas fields off Gaza', although it may play a role.

The issue isn't the gas.

The issue is the people.

Palestinians' very existence is a problem for Israel. They must be eliminated.

Problem is, 'those normal people' keep making such a fuss about it.

As Joe Quinn explained recently:
As clinical studies on the psychopathic mind make clear, psychopaths periodically experience a compelling drive to give vent to their destructive instincts. In the case of psychopaths in positions of power, this usually means some kind of 'war' where innocent civilians (aka 'non-combatants') are targeted for the most brutal suffering. In the specific case of the Israeli psychopathic 'elite', the psychological profile goes something like this:

Netanyahu and his ilk have a deep, almost unconscious desire to obliterate the Palestinians, to 'erase them from the pages of history', because the Palestinians stand in the way of them achieving their goal of a idealized Jewish state where they reign supreme. The Israeli/Zionist ideologues are frequently and privately enraged at the Palestinians because the Palestinians force the Zionists to struggle to find a way to achieve their racist goals without tarnishing their own self-image as 'seeking peace' 'defending the Jewish people' being 'the only Democracy in the Middle East' etc. To the psychopaths in Israel therefore, all Palestinians are 'evil', but there's a problem: the Palestinians are not evil and their cause is just by normal human standards.

If it was up to them, the psychopaths in Israel would just kill all the Palestinians and be done with it. But they can't because they are constrained by human rights, innocence, respect and other 'silly' ideals adhered to by normal people, and to which the psychopaths must also pay lip service if they are to maintain their mask of humanity on the world stage.

To get what they want therefore, the Israeli psychopaths must solve the problem of the Palestinians not conforming (in reality) to the evil image the Israelis have of them, that would allow the Israelis to freely express their destructive urges and achieve their idealized vision of a Jewish state. The solution that psychopathic types everywhere invariably come up with is to 'create their own reality' where they literally manufacture a 'reality' to fit the demonized image they have of the 'enemy' that stands in their way. At that point, they have the 'just cause' to attack the 'enemy' whose mere existence has been 'unfairly' thwarting their attempts to get what they want i.e. achieve their psychopathic agenda.


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Heart - Black

Shelling and killing civilians: western hypocrisy over Israel and Ukraine

Alexander Clackson
Global Research
Sun, 13 Jul 2014 07:35 UTC
whitewash war crimes
Western leaders have frequently used the pretext of 'protecting civilians' to carry out their aggressive and illegal military interventions, such as directly in Libya, Iraq, and indirectly in Syria by supporting extremists.

It has already been established that this pretext was nothing more than an excuse to carry out regime change that would benefit Washington. The current violence in Ukraine and Israel, where the Ukrainian and Israeli governments are shelling and killing civilians, while the West turns a blind eye, further illustrates the hypocritical and immoral nature of Western governments.

Comment: It's no wonder that there's never any action to stop the bloodbaths of innocent civilians around the world, when the psychopaths in positions of power shamelessly broadcast their lies and propaganda to excuse acting out their natural instincts, and those purportedly protecting the innocent tiptoe around calling it as it is: cold blooded murders, for NO reason at all.

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Cult

Perception management: UK police arrest 660 suspected low-level pedophiles

Josh Halliday & Hatty Collier
The Guardian
Wed, 16 Jul 2014 07:45 UTC
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BBC 'Cover up' in action:

The latest sweep on low-level offenders conveniently puts the investigations into pedophiles in parliament in the shade.
More than 600 suspected paedophiles, including doctors and teachers, have been arrested across Britain after a six-month investigation led by the National Crime Agency.

The agency, dubbed Britain's FBI, announced on Wednesday it had arrested 660 suspected child abusers and taken more than 400 children into care in the first nationwide investigation of its kind.

Of the 660 arrested, 39 were registered sex offenders but the vast majority of suspected paedophiles were off the police's radar. Those arrested include doctors, teachers, scout leaders, care workers and former police officers.

The operation, which had remained secret until Wednesday, targeted people accessing indecent images of children online.

Phil Gormley, the NCA deputy director general, said: "This is the first time the UK has had the capability to coordinate a single targeted operation of this nature.
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Star of David

Israeli calls for Palestinian blood ring at fever pitch

David Sheen
Electronic Intifada
Tue, 15 Jul 2014 00:00 UTC
Image
© Oren Ziv / ActiveStills
Right-wing nationalists attack activists protesting Israel’s air strikes on Gaza in central Tel Aviv on 12 July.
Concerned humanists may have hoped that when a group of Jewish Israelis confessed to kidnapping and killing Muhammad Abu Khudair, a Palestinian teenager in Jerusalem - forcing him to drink gasoline and torching him to death from inside his body - that top Israeli legislators and rabbis would have been horrified at what their revenge rhetoric had triggered, and seriously scaled back their calls for war.

These hopes would have been in vain. In the days since the lynchers were arrested, the anti-Arab rhetoric has continued to ring at a fever pitch. Even as the Israeli army pummels the Gaza Strip with explosives - more than 1,500 tons have been dropped on Gaza by the time of this writing, killing 193 people and wounding approximately 1,200, the vast majority of them civilians - Israeli political, religious and cultural leaders continue to incite sectarian divisions for political profit.

On the eve of Abu Khudair's lynching, Member of Knesset (Israel's parliament) and government faction whip Ayelet Shaked issued a call over Facebook to ethnically cleanse the land, declaring "the entire Palestinian people is the enemy." She advocated their complete destruction, "including its elderly and its women," adding that these must be slaughtered, otherwise they might give birth to more "little snakes."

It would be hard to find a more explicit call for genocide.

Comment: See: Psychopathic 'Morality': The Truth Behind the Kidnapping and Murder of 3 Israeli Teens

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Heart - Black

U.S.-backed genocide in Ukraine: Child rescued from debris following airstrike on residential building (VIDEO)


RT
Wed, 16 Jul 2014 07:34 UTC
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Amid scenes of destruction and death caused by Ukrainian airstrike on residential buildings in the city of Snezhnoe in the breakaway Donetsk People's Republic, a 7-year-old child has been miraculously saved from beneath a multi-ton pile of debris.

Eyewitness rescue footage showing the cleanup work of the apartment house, managed to capture rescue workers saving the life of a child who miraculously avoided being crushed by tons of debris. Unfortunately other victims of the air strike were not so lucky. So far 11 have died and 8 more are wounded. The regional administration of Donetsk has announced the injured child was receiving treatment in hospital.

The video (starting at 3:42) captured the details of the rescue of Bogdan, whose muddled cries were heard as hundreds of rescuers and civilians were looking for survivors of the tragedy.

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Briefcase

Do as we say, not as we do! U.S. loses multi-billion dollar WTO court cases against China and India, cites rest of planet's concern with illegal U.S. protection measures


RT
Wed, 16 Jul 2014 07:30 UTC
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The World Trade Organization agreed on Monday this week to side with claims against the United States made by both China and India concerning US-imposed tariffs on products exported to America.

In both instances, the WTO ruled against the US and decided in favor of the major BRICs countries, who for two years now have each asked the organization to intervene and weigh in on America's use of tariffs to tax certain imports dating back to 2007.

With regards to both cases, the WTO's judges ruled that the US acted "inconsistent with its agreement on subsidies and countervailing duties," or taxes imposed on goods sold by "public bodies."

In China, the panel agreed, US officials improperly levied those taxes against state-owned enterprises that the WTO does not consider to be "public bodies." Instead, the WTO said, those entities were majority-owned by the Chinese government, but did not perform "government function" or exercise "government authority," according to the Financial Times. With respect to India, the WTO again agreed that the US was wrong to similarly treat state-owned National Mineral Development Corporation as a public body, according to the International Business Times.
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Folder

Full steam ahead towards Federal States of Europe: Juncker becomes new European Commission president


RT
Wed, 16 Jul 2014 07:15 UTC
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© AFP Photo / Frederic Florin
Newly elected European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker gives a press conference on July 15, 2014 with the European Parliament head at the European Parliament in the eastern French city of Strasbourg.
Jean-Claude Juncker has been appointed the new boss of the European Parliament, as he promised to 'reindustrialize' the economy and put the EU's 25 million unemployed back to work.

The 59-year-old former Luxembourg Prime Minister takes the post at a hard time for the European economy. The 28 EU member state unemployment rate is hitting 10 percent, with 5.2 million young people or almost every fifth youth without a job. Meanwhile the International Monetary Fund cut the GDP growth forecast to 1 percent in 2014 instead of the 1.1 percent announced earlier.

Juncker acknowledged many Europeans had lost confidence in the EU and recognized that it wasn't endless debate over EU institutions, but economic results and full employment that would restore their trust.

The politician proposed a new 300 billion euro ($409 billion) public-private investment program and also help to create new workplaces and to stimulate economic growth in Europe in the next three years.

On November 1 Juncker will take the position which is assumed to be the most powerful in the EU as the Commission proposes and enforces laws for half-a-billion European citizens.

Comment:
Jean-Claude Juncker has been appointed the new boss of the European Parliament...
Not quite. He's been appointed President of the European Commission, which is effectively the unelected civil service body of the EU.

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