Hamas signs off on Palestinian efforts to join International Criminal Court as international legal experts demand accountability

The push to engage the International Criminal Court in an investigation into possible war crimes by Israel for its military attacks on the civilian population of the Gaza Strip is gaining steam among Palestinian political factions as well as members of the international legal community.

On Friday, an international coalition of legal advocacy organizations wrote to the ICC's chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, urging her to initiate an investigation into serious crimes committed by Israeli forces during it ongoing military operation against Palestinians living in Gaza, dubbed Operation Protective Edge.

And on Saturday - as Israeli airstrikes and bombing appeared to intensify once again - Hamas made it known that it will now support an effort by the Palestinian Authority to formally join the ICC.

Ukraine needs to purchase additional five billion cubic meters of gas from Russia for the forthcoming winter season, Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said Friday.

"Can Ukraine now survive without Russian gas? No, it can't. How much Russian gas do we need to buy? About 5 billion cubic meters," he said in an interview with Ukrainian TV channels.

He said that three-party gas talks, involving Ukraine, Russia and the European Union, are scheduled to take place next month.

"I hope there will be some final stage to these talks," he said.

He added that Kiev had reserved $3.1 billion for gas purchases in the National Bank of Ukraine.

On June 16, Russian gas giant Gazprom introduced a prepayment system for gas deliveries to Ukraine amid a dispute with Kiev over its $4.5 billion gas debt. The European Commission and Gazprom anticipate problems in winter, when Kiev is likely to run out of its own gas reserves.

The Russian compromise was a $100 discount to the contract price, bringing it down to $385, as well as a phased debt repayment scheme. Ukraine declined the offer, dissatisfied with the discount mechanism.Current Ukraine's gas debt is estimated to be more than $5 billion.


Earlier, Ukrainian national oil and gas company Naftogaz suggested to European companies purchasing Russian gas on the border between Russia and Ukraine. The European Commission said it would require a renegotiation of the transit contracts and a trilateral meeting between the European Commission, Russia and Ukraine.

On August 11, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko discussed the possibility of resuming gas talks between Ukraine, Russia and the European Union with European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.

Official Washington's war-hysteria machine is running at full speed again after Russia unilaterally dispatched a convoy of trucks carrying humanitarian supplies to the blockaded Ukrainian city of Luhansk, writes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

Before dawn broke in Washington on Saturday, "Ukrainian pro-Russian separatists" - more accurately described as federalists of southeast Ukraine who oppose last February's coup in Kiev - unloaded desperately needed provisions from some 280 Russian trucks in Luhansk, Ukraine. The West accused those trucks of "invading" Ukraine on Friday, but it was a record short invasion; after delivering their loads of humanitarian supplies, many of the trucks promptly returned to Russia.

I happen to know what a Russian invasion looks like, and this isn't it. Forty-six years ago, I was ten miles from the border of Czechoslovakia when Russian tanks stormed in to crush the "Prague Spring" experiment in democracy. The attack was brutal.

Once back in Munich, West Germany, where my duties included substantive liaison with Radio Free Europe, I experienced some of the saddest moments of my life listening to radio station after radio station on the Czech side of the border playing Smetana's patriotic "Ma vlast" (My Homeland) before going silent for more than two decades.

I was not near the frontier between Russia and southeastern Ukraine on Friday as the convoy of some 280 Russian supply trucks started rolling across the border heading toward the federalist-held city of Luhansk, but that "invasion" struck me as more like an attempt to break a siege, a brutal method of warfare that indiscriminately targets all, including civilians, violating the principle of non-combatant immunity.

The concept of "supply and demand" is a basic in economics. The rarer a commodity or resource is, the more it costs. The more abundant a resource or commodity is, the less it costs. Scarcity increases an items market value.

Oil and natural gas, despite government subsidies and other efforts to the contrary, are still subject to basic economic laws. The more oil and natural gas on the market, the less the cost. If the price of oil or natural gas falls, this means less profit for those who sell it.

The United States and Russia top the global oil and natural gas market. The US has just recently surpassed Russia as the top oil and natural gas producer.

The price of natural gas is in great decline due to a new innovation. The practice of hydraulic fracking, recently introduced in the US as a means for extracting shale gas resources, has created a huge abundance of natural gas. The price of natural gas is going down, threatening global markets.

In addition, oil is in over abundance. New African oil markets are also opening up. Oil and natural gas are non-renewable resources, yet the problem for the Wall Street bankers with names like Morgan and Rockfeller, is that there is too much of it. To keep the prices high, scarcity is a necessity.

The Rise of Russia and China

Russia, with its state owned natural gas company, is the top rival of the US in the natural gas market. The removal, or weakening of Russia within the world natural gas market is an economic necessity for the owners of US natural gas companies.

The Soviet Union was once the primary rival of the United States. It led a block of countries, some led by Communists, others led by Independent Nationalists, who developed independently, and broke the economic chains of Wall Street and London.

The events of 1991 devastated the USSR and Eastern Europe, causing a surge of poverty, chaos, and suffering. However, emerging from this chaos and suffering has been the nationalist government of Vladimir Putin. Russia has re-emerged from the crisis of the 90s, as an economic power. It is exporting oil and natural gas, and building an alliance with China, Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran.

Putin's recent visits to oil producing South American countries confirms the growing influence of Russia on global markets. The plan for a natural gas pipeline, connecting Russia and China, is also another blow to Wall Street.

The rule of the capitalist market is "expand or die." Wall Street's influence is contracting, and its profits are shrinking. As the price of oil and natural gas declines, and more markets slip away toward China and Russia, the Wall Street monopolists are running out of options. In their desperation to stay on top, and keep their profits flowing in, they are doing their best to destroy economic rivals.

Perhaps nothing symbolizes the decline of the New Yorker magazine more than the hatchet job on Vandana Shiva that appears in the latest issue. Written by Michael Specter, the author of Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, the article is a meretricious defense of genetically modified organisms (GMO) relying on one dodgy source after another. This is the same magazine whose reputation was at its apex when Rachel Carson's groundbreaking articles on DDT appeared in 1962. If DDT was once a symbol of the destructive power of chemicals on the environment, GMO amounts to one of the biggest threats to food production today. It threatens to enrich powerful multinational corporations while turning farmers into indentured servants through the use of patented seeds. Furthermore, it threatens to unleash potentially calamitous results in farmlands through unintended mutations.

Let's not ignore the co-conspirator in the continued injustice perpetrated against Palestinians

Last month I wrote an essay detailing the dangers of criticizing Israeli aggression against Palestinians, particularly when one is in the United States, a country that not only supports Israel with $3.1 billion annually in military aid but also regularly vetoes any attempt by the United Nations Security Council to sanction Israel for war crimes.

The news that brilliant sociologist Steven Salaita had a job offer rescinded at the University of Illinois for expressing criticism of Israeli actions in Gaza came as no surprise. It seems practically inevitable, given the almost universal experience of everyone I've spoken to in the United States who has publicly condemned Israel's behavior. By conflating Israel with Judaism - as Rabbi Michael Lerner phrased it succinctly for Salon, "by turning the Israeli nation state into 'the Jewish state' and making Israel into an idol to be worshiped rather than a political entity like any other political entity" - supporters of Israel deflect righteous criticism of the atrocities committed against the Palestinian people as anti-Semitic slurs.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton perfectly summarized the United States' stance this week when she blamed Hamas' "anti-Semitism" for the more than 2,000 Palestinian deaths in the most recent conflict - and not the arms the United States ships to Israel. No matter that The Times of Israel runs op-eds titled "When genocide is permissible" and Likud's Moshe Feiglin, deputy speaker in the Knesset, calls for Gaza to be incorporated into Israel and for Palestinians to be driven into the Sinai. No matter that while the consequent rise of anti-Semitism is well documented by mainstream newspapers such as The New York Times, little time has been devoted to the similarly bigoted anti-Muslim, anti-Arab sentiments that inevitably increase in proportion. The U.S. government's message to the world is clear: America will not hold Israel accountable. And we, in turn, will not hold our government accountable for its continued, quiet and yet blatant backing of Israel.

More than 7,000 troops from China, Russia and four central Asia countries have gathered in Inner Mongolia for their biggest joint drills to fight terrorists.

A total of 23 Chinese aircraft will participate in Peace Mission-2014, along with tanks, drones and air-defense missiles from countries in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, China's Xinhua News Agency reported. The SCO groups China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

The exercises are another sign China and Russia are willing to work together as both seek to upgrade their military capacity in the face of rising territorial tensions. The drills will prepare troops to protect the so-called Silk Road economic and transport belt that will run through central Asia from China to Europe from terrorist attack, China Radio International reported.

After news -- and footage -- of journalist James Foley's death began circulating on social media networks, tech firms immediately had to grapple with the question of how to handle the graphic images. Twitter, arguably the fastest-moving and most public social network, opted to do something that it rarely does. The company scrubbed images of Foley's beheading from its network, and even temporarily blocked the account of journalist Zaid Benjamin, who appeared to be the first to report the news.

When asked why it took the images down, Twitter said it does not share information on specific cases. But it did refer reporters to its policies regarding takedown requests from the family members of deceased users. That indicates that the firm took down the photos and videos of Foley's death not because of a request from the U.S. government--which reached out to social media sites regarding the video on Tuesday--but because the family had asked it to, shortly after the news broke.

The policy, recently changed, outlines the guidelines Twitter follows to remove imagery of deceased individuals at the request of immediate family members -- a policy enacted after some Twitter users bullied the daughter of comedian Robin Williams off the network by sending her altered images supposedly depicting her father's corpse.

How does Twitter scrub its network of the offensive images, which tend to spread online very quickly? The process is actually low-tech. When a request is submitted, Twitter employees on the company's safety and legal teams look at the image that's been flagged, reviewing each one individually, and evaluating the public interest and newsworthiness of each message. That, for example, could explain why some images of Foley's death were taken down immediately, while others bore a warning.

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) is conducting a nationwide search of its cold storage units after discovering vials of smallpox in a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cold storage room at the National Institutes of Health facility in Bethesda, Maryland. Along with the vials of smallpox were 327 other pathogens including vials labeled for dengue, influenza, and rickettsia. This news comes as the CDC is under multiple investigations for unsafe practices. In response to the news Richard H. Ebright, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University remarked "It is ironic that the institution that sets U.S. standards for safety and security of work with human pathogens fails to meet its own standards."

It's official: Right now the No. 1 rule in Hollywood is that you can talk about anything political - except Israel's attack on the Christians and Muslims in Gaza, Palestine. That's not a conspiracy theory from critics of Israel or Jew-hating neo-Nazis. Instead, that was the thesis of a candid article in the August 1 edition of The Hollywood Reporter (THR), influential trade journal of the entertainment industry.

In fact, the article was bluntly titled: "Rule 1: Talk About Anything Political in Hollywood . . . Except Gaza."

That such an article would appear in a magazine considered "must" reading for those in show business was a not-so-subtle warning that anyone who violates that rule is in for a tough road ahead.

Noting several celebrities had expressed sympathies for the plight of Gaza, THR commented ominously that - "for now at least" - powerful Jewish moguls in Hollywood were simply dismissing those entertainers as being "uninformed." However, continue speaking out this way and there will be trouble.