© UnknownPalestinian children in the Gaza Strip (file photo)

A Palestinian human rights organization says crimes committed by Israelis against Palestinian children amount to war crimes, Press TV reports.

"Killing children in armed conflicts is a war crime and that is exactly what Israeli forces did to Palestinian children," Samir Zaqut, an official from al-Mezan Center for Human Rights, told Press TV.

He further noted, "Israeli forces killed and injured thousands of Palestinian children in the past 14 years."

"There is also arbitrary arrest of the Palestinian children ...," he added.

Last year, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) voiced alarm over the Israeli regime's use of violence against Palestinian children.

In its report, the agency said some 700 Palestinian children aged 12 to 17 are arrested, interrogated and detained by the Israeli forces every year in the occupied West Bank.

A senior Iranian official has slammed a recent anti-Iran resolution by the European Parliament (EP), stressing that the Islamic Republic sees no value in such "baseless judgments."

The recent EP resolution is merely aimed at exerting political pressure on Iran, said Ali Akbar Velayati, who is a top advisor to Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei.

"These kinds of unjust and groundless judgments are of no value to the Iranian nation," he said.

The anti-Iran resolution, which was adopted on April 3, expresses concern over the alleged violation of human rights in the Islamic Republic.

It also claims that Iran's presidential election in June 2013, which was marked by a high voter turnout and led to the victory of President Hassan Rouhani, was "not held according to the democratic standards valued by the EU."

Velayati further described the European Parliament as a "pressure tool" in the hands of the United States and its allies to achieve their "illegitimate" goals against countries that seek to be independent.

Isn't there something strangely reassuring when your eyeballs are gripped by a " mystery" on the news that has no greater meaning and yet sweeps all else away? This, of course, is the essence of the ongoing tale of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Except to the relatives of those on board, it never really mattered what happened in the cockpit that day.

To the extent that the plane's disappearance was solvable, the mystery could only end in one of two ways: it landed somewhere (somehow unnoticed, a deep unlikelihood) or it crashed somewhere, probably in an ocean. End of story. It was, however, a tale with thrilling upsides when it came to filling airtime, especially on cable news. The fact that there was no there there allowed for the raising of every possible disappearance trope -- from Star Trekkian black holes to the Bermuda Triangle to Muslim terrorists -- and it had the added benefit of instantly evoking a popular TV show. It was a formula too good to waste, and wasted it wasn't.

The same has been true of the story that, in the U.S., came to vie with it for the top news spot: the devastating mudslide in Washington State. An act of nature, sweeping out of nowhere, buries part of a tiny community, leaving an unknown but possibly large number of people dead. Was anyone still alive under all that mud? (Such potential " miracles" are like manna from heaven for the TV news.) How many died? These questions mattered locally and to desperate relatives of those who had disappeared, but otherwise had little import. Yes, unbridled growth, lack of attention to expected disasters, and even possibly climate change were topics that might have been attached to the mudslide horror. As a gruesome incident, it could have stood in for a lot, but in the end it stood in for nothing except itself and that was undoubtedly its abiding appeal.

So what do we know now that we didn't after documentarian Errol Morris's 100-minute Q&A with Donald "I Don't Do Quagmires" Rumsfeld in "The Unknown Known"? Only that the former U.S. secretary of defence is still a master strategist of evasion, contradiction, misdirection and malapropism.

As a footnote, here's what we do know to date about that dirty little Iraq War that "Rummy," the George W. Bush White House and their nincompoop Pentagon neo-cons cooked up and spoon fed to the omnivorous American public: more than 4400 U.S. military deaths and 32,000 wounded, at least 100,000 to as many as 500,000 Iraqi fatalities, millions more displaced, and an estimated price tag of $3 trillion, give or take a few hundred billion.

Yet like most of the questions that Morris tosses - gently - at his subject, any such factual horrors are sidestepped, parried and danced around by a fitfully nimble Rumsfeld. Relaxed, nattily dressed and imperiously self-assured as ever, Morris' hollow yet overstuffed man does his imitation of "Hogan's Heroes" Sgt. Schultz ("I know nothing, nothing") while implausibly denying personal culpability for any stink that blew back from the Iraq War, whether the phony Weapons of Mass Destruction raison d'être, prisoner torture or the fictitious links between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 World Trade Centre attacks.

France has reacted with fury after the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, renewed accusations of direct French involvement in the 1994 genocide, on the eve of ceremonies marking the 20th anniversary.

The French government announced that the justice minister, Christiane Taubira, would not attend the commemorations in Kigali after Kagame, in an interview with the weekly magazine Jeune Afrique, accused both France and Belgium of having a "direct role" in the genocide.

A total 800,000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed in the four-month killing spree triggered by the assassination of Rwanda's Hutu president Juvénal Habyarimana.

The spirited French reaction highlights France's tormented relations with Rwanda since Kagame, the former leader of the Tutsi rebels who swept to power after the genocide, became president.

Russia's barrage of sarcastic comments to the Obama administration, which is seeking to impose sanctions to change Moscow's stance on Ukraine, has been enriched with a piece of advice to relax and look for inner tranquility.

The comments came from Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov, who was speaking with Interfax news agency about the worst period of tension between Russia and the US over the past two decades.

"The American leadership is apparently stuck, and they just can't accept the new situation, which arose to a great degree as a result of the deliberate effort of the US and their European allies to bring anti-Russian forces to power in Ukraine," the diplomat stated.

"What can we advise our American colleagues to do? Spend more time outdoors, do some yoga, have healthy food, probably, watch more comedy series on TV. That would be better than working yourselves and others up, knowing that the train is already departed and that no tantrums, crying and hysterics can help," he added.

Pyongyang's deputy UN ambassador warns US that moves viewed as crossing 'red line' will provoke countermeasures

North Korea on Friday accused the US of being "hell-bent on regime change" and warned that any manoeuvres with that intention will be viewed as a "red line" that will result in countermeasures.

Pyongyang's deputy United Nations ambassador, Ri Tong Il, also repeated that his government "made it very clear we will carry out a new form of nuclear test" but refused to elaborate, saying only: "I recommend you to wait and see what it is."

His comments came at North Korea's second press conference at the UN in two weeks, a surprising rate for the reclusive Communist regime.

Ri blamed the US for aggravating tensions on the Korean peninsula by continuing "very dangerous" military drills with South Korea, by pursuing action in the UN security council against his country's recent ballistic missile launches and by going after Pyongyang's human rights performance.

American bankers who brought on the 2008 global financial collapse, by and large, didn't get indicted, or face any significant consequences for their actions. In fact, many of them even got huge bonuses.

That wouldn't have been the case in Vietnam, another nation struggling with corrupt and unscrupulous bankers.

During a recent cleanup of Vietnam's financial sector, the strictly authoritarian nation sentenced three bankers to death by firing squad in the past six months alone.

Since the overthrow of the Yanukovych government in Ukraine at the end of February 2014, the mainstream media en masse has attempted to whitewash the nature of the current Ukrainian government. This has occurred even in some progressive publications and websites, e.g., a recent two-part series in Rabble.ca.

As soon as this government took over, the New York Times referred to it as a new wave of democracy, and this then set the tone for the media in the West. Although here and there it's sometimes mentioned that Svoboda, a member of the coalition government, "once had some quasi-fascist inclinations," that's as far as it goes. All else about Svoboda and the paramilitary Right Sector has been effectively swept off into Orwell's memory hole.

This is not to say that no one on the Internet has commented on the true nature of Svoboda. To their credit a number of well qualified observers have had no problem spelling out that Svoboda has a solid neo-nazi fascist basis, and not just "inclinations" towards these beliefs. For example, consider the views of Max Blumenthal, Professor Stephen F. Cohen, Professor Francis Boyle,Professor Michel Chossudovsky,Dr. Inna Rogatchi, David Speedie, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, Oleg Shynkarenko, Andrew Foxall and Oren Kessler.

In the months and weeks leading up to March 31, the Obama administration pushed the message through press releases, tweets and blog posts that the last day in March was the final opportunity to get health insurance in 2014. A White House blog post on Monday is typical, beginning with the words, "If you don't have health insurance, today is the last day to get coverage that starts in 2014." Many of the White House's celebrity endorsers proclaimed on Twitter, "TODAY is the Last Day to #GetCovered!" Although exceptions were noted for extraordinary circumstances, certain "life events," and a special extension for those "in line" as of March 31, the impression given was that those who missed the deadline were out of luck.

However, the day after open enrollment for Obamacare ended, the website for Healthcare.gov updated the entry under the topic, "How can I get coverage outside of open enrollment?"