Society's ChildS


Handcuffs

Essex police arrest two after asylum hotel protests turn violent

Matthew Weaver, Ben Quinn
The Guardian
Fri, 18 Jul 2025 09:31 UTC
Protester
© Lab Ky Mo/Sopa/ShutterstockProtester confronts officers in riot gear preventing him from joining anti-racism activists • Epping, England
Police say eight officers were assaulted when crowds surrounded a small counter-demonstration.

Two people have been arrested after a protest outside a hotel housing asylum seekers during which eight officers were assaulted, Essex police said. Riot police wore helmets and took up position while crowds of men, some masked, surrounded a small counter-demonstration by anti-racism activists on Thursday evening.

The counter-extremism group, Hope Not Hate, warned that known far-right activists were calling for further unrest in Epping and elsewhere.

The assistant chief constable Stuart Hooper condemned the violence as "mindless thuggery" and said it was started by people who "had come here intentionally to be involved in that kind of selfish vandalism and violence".

Counterdemonstrators and police were pelted with plastic bottles, eggs and flour but the violence worsened as those in the crowd directly attacked the police and vandalised police vans as officers withdrew.
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Briefcase

Ireland's proposed boycott of Israeli businesses is creating a dangerous legal trap for American investors

Anat Alon-Beck, Mark Goldfeder and Erielle Davidson
Fox News
Sat, 19 Jul 2025 23:15 UTC
pro palestine demonstration dublin ireland
© Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty ImagesPro-Palestinian activists from the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign, supported by members of left-wing parties including People Before Profit and the Socialist Party and students, participate in the National March for Palestine from the Garden of Remembrance to Connell Street and Leinster House, on May 18, 2024, in Dublin, Ireland.
Legal experts warn companies to conduct compliance audits as Irish BDS law conflicts with US anti-boycott regulations

Ireland has announced plans to pass a first-of-its-kind European law banning imports from Israeli businesses operating in Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Like most Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) efforts, the bill is unlikely to inflict measurable economic harm on Israel. However, it poses a very real — and potentially devastating — threat to American businesses and investors.

Under U.S. law, it is illegal for American companies to participate in or support foreign-government-backed boycotts of Israel. The Export Administration Regulations (enforced by the Department of Commerce's Office of Antiboycott Compliance) and Internal Revenue Code § 999 (administered by the IRS) prohibit exactly the kind of conduct Ireland's legislation seeks to compel. These statutes were enacted in response to the Arab League boycott and are grounded not only in economic self-interest but also in civil rights law: The boycotts of the Jewish State have always been about who Jews are — not what Israel does. More recent legislation, like the 2016 Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act, reaffirmed America's bipartisan commitment to combating BDS.

Comment: Yes, America first. Most companies are doing business in Ireland because that country was suckered into creating massive tax advantages for multinational corporations. Bring the capitol back, invest at home, and you won't have the problem.

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Star of David

How the BBC deliberately obscures UK complicity in Gaza genocide

Jonathan Cook
Middle East Eye
Fri, 18 Jul 2025 21:04 UTC
protest britain bbc propaganda gaza israel
© Benjamin Cremel/AFPA protester holds up a placard with an anti-BBC message during a pro-Palestinian demonstration in central London on 23 March 2025
Manufactured 'scandals' over Gaza coverage are designed to browbeat the corporation into ever-greater cravenness to Israel

After months of a confected furore over a BBC documentary supposedly demonstrating pro-Hamas bias, followed by the shelving of a second film on Gaza, an independent review recently found that the broadcaster did not breach impartiality guidelines.

A long list of complaints against Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone - pushed for months by pro-Israel lobbying groups, and amplified by the British establishment media - were dismissed one after another by Peter Johnston, director of the editorial complaints and review body that reports to the BBC director general.

Not that you would know any of this from the eagerness of BBC executives to continue apologising profusely for the failings the corporation had just been cleared of. It almost sounded as if they wanted to be found guilty.

Comment:



One of the problems:



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Dollars

Soft power, hard cash: How the UK secretly buys influencers

Timur Tarkhanov
RT
Fri, 18 Jul 2025 19:01 UTC
Lammy
© Ian Forsyth/Getty ImagesBritain's Foreign Secretary David Lammy
The British Foreign Office is at it again: 'strengthening democracy' and 'fighting misinformation' by paying YouTube personalities.

There is something profoundly grotesque about a government that funds "freedom campaigns" through secret payments to social media stars, complete with non-disclosure agreements forbidding them to reveal who's really pulling the strings.

Yet that's precisely what Britain's Foreign Office has been caught doing. A recent investigation by Declassified UK revealed that the UK government had covertly paid dozens of foreign YouTube influencers to promote messages aligned with British foreign policy - under the familiar, pious banners of "democracy support" and "combating disinformation."

Of course, those slogans sound wholesome enough. Who wouldn't be in favour of democracy or against lies online? But this framing is the point: it launders raw geopolitical interests into the comforting language of values. In reality, this is simply propaganda. Slick, decentralized, modernized - but propaganda nonetheless.
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Star of David

Israel didn't give permits to these Bedouin villages to build bomb shelters. So they built their own

Maya Alleruzzo, Melanie Lidman
AP
Wed, 16 Jul 2025 12:05 UTC
Ahmed peeks out
© Maya Alleruzzo/APAhmed Abu Ganima in the window of the minibus, a makeshift bomb shelter his family uses
Khashem Zaneh, an unrecognized Bedouin village • Negev Desert, southern Israel • July 2, 2025
When the sirens wail in the southern Israeli desert to herald an incoming missile, Ahmad Abu Ganima's family scrambles outside. Down some dirt-hewn steps, one by one, they squeeze through the window of a minibus buried under 10 feet (three meters) of dirt.

Abu Ganima, a mechanic, got the cast-off bus from his employer after it was stripped for parts. He buried it in his yard to create an ad-hoc bomb shelter for his family. Abu Ganima is part of Israel's 300,000 Bedouin community, a previously nomadic tribe that lives scattered across the arid Negev Desert.

More than two thirds of the Bedouin have no access to shelters, says Huda Abu Obaid, executive director of Negev Coexistence Forum, which lobbies for Bedouin issues in southern Israel. As the threat of missiles became more dire during the 12-day war with Iran last month, many Bedouin families resorted to building DIY shelters out of available material: buried steel containers, buried trucks, repurposed construction debris.
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Attention

Vatican calls for 'immediate ceasefire' after Israeli attack on Catholic church in Gaza


RT
Thu, 17 Jul 2025 12:39 UTC
Holy Family Church Catholic nuns Gaza palestine
© Getty ImagesCatholic nuns attend a mass at the Holy Family Church in Gaza City on December 17, 2022.
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has acknowledged that the IDF struck the Holy Family Church, blaming the incident on "stray ammunition"

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has shelled the only Catholic church in Gaza, reportedly killing three people and injuring several more, prompting Pope Leo XIV to send a telegram to the parish expressing his condolences. West Jerusalem has acknowledged the deadly incident, attributing it to "stray ammunition."

Israel has already drawn international censure for the destruction left by its conflict with Hamas and other militant groups in the Palestinain enclave, which has left 92% of homes there damaged or destroyed, according to a May, 2025 UNRWA statement.
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Revolver

Voice of America employee accused of making threats to kill Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, family

Zoe Hussain
New York Post
Fri, 18 Jul 2025 21:43 UTC
Seth Jason voa death threats Marjorie Taylor Greene
© VOAEx-VOA employee Seth Jason allegedly threatened to assault and kill Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and her family members during a series of phone calls between 2023 and 2025
A longtime Voice of America employee was arrested Thursday and accused of threatening to kill far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, her staff and their families — including making a call in which he vowed to shoot the lawmaker "between the eyes" with an AK-47.

Seth Jason, 64, of Edgewater, Md., made at least eight threatening calls from the government-funded broadcaster between October 2023 and January this year, the Justice Department alleged in a statement.

"I'm looking forward to your book signing. We are all armed and ready to take care of you," Jason said in one message for the Georgia Republican lawmaker, according to prosecutors.

"We're coming after you and your staff, and we are locked and loaded. We're going to take you all out," the call continued.
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Bullseye

Ultra-based Tucker Carlson vs. the Banks

Benjamin Bartee
Armageddon Prose
Fri, 18 Jul 2025 20:17 UTC
Tucker Carlson
© Chip Somodevilla / Gettyimages.ruTucker Carlson
Over the last half-century, finance industry goblins run amok have wrecked the American middle class, which, at this rate, won't exist at all in twenty years.

Millions of young Americans, as a consequence of the 2008 financial collapse alone — the underlying cause of which has gone unremedied, by the way — forever lost any sense of hope of ever affording a house of their own.

Depriving the youth of any cause for optimism is no way to run a country.

Quite the contrary, it's a recipe for entropy.
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Dollars

Does the BRICS currency threaten the dollar?

Pule Makgale
TheStar.co.za
Fri, 18 Jul 2025 00:32 UTC
BRICS leaders
© LinkedINAccording to economists and political analysts, one of the main reasons for Trump's economic rhetoric has to do with US fears that BRICS countries are embarking on a strategic plan to dethrone the dollar, or de-dollarise the world, as some observers put it.
'DE-DOLLARISATION' FEARS

Some people may wonder why the US President has been acting out in recent months, threatening to impose tariffs at times in a seemingly excessive manner.

Economists and political analysts suggest that one of the main reasons for Trump's economic rhetoric is the United States' concern that BRICS countries are initiating a strategic plan to undermine the dollar, a process some observers refer to as "de-dollarisation''.

The BRICS grouping comprises Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, as well as a few other countries that have joined in the past couple of years.

Comment:
The dollar, the euro and Western sanctions have been used as political pressure tools for years. As shown by the example of Russia, funds held by a country in foreign accounts and so-called reserve currencies, like the dollar and the euro can be seized from one day to the next, just as doubt can be raised regarding the stability of the US currency in the long run considering the US national debt of currently around 37 trillion dollar.

It is ironic that part of the reason the US was founded was that the colonies could not issue their own money and had to pay taxes they did not benefit from. Now the US and its western allies would like to dissuade others from using the money they have created to trade between themselves.

Here are more images:
BRICS 100
© Unknown
BRICS 200
© Unknown/TASS?
See also:

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Star of David

Death toll nears 600 in Syria's Sweida as Israeli airstrike hits outskirts, Bedouin displacement intensifies

Huaxia
Xinhua
Fri, 18 Jul 2025 05:22 UTC
Map of Syria
© Wiki for Southern Syria clashes (July 2025–present)Military situation as of 15 July 2025 at 18:00 UTC. The Sweida Province, better known as the Suwayda or the As-Suwayda Governorate, is the area marked in red.
DAMASCUS, July 17 (Xinhua) -- The death toll from this week's deadly clashes in southern Syria's Sweida province has risen to nearly 600, as tensions continued Thursday amid an Israeli airstrike on the outskirts of the provincial capital of Sweida, state-run media and a war monitor reported.

According to Syria's official news agency SANA, an Israeli warplane launched a new air raid targeting the vicinity of Sweida city, a day after Israeli strikes hit military and symbolic state sites in Damascus. No immediate casualties were reported from Thursday's strike.

The escalation comes as the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 597 people had been killed since July 13, when fighting erupted between local Druze armed groups and Syrian government forces, sparking what the watchdog described as one of the deadliest episodes of intra-Syrian conflict in years.

Comment:
The ceasefire mentioned in the article has ceased: Fighting in Syria's Suwayda erupts again between Bedouins and the Druze according to Al Jazzera. While many might look at the map of Syria with disinterest, what if this was not a map of Syria, but an area of Western Europe? The differences between minorities that had accumulated in Syria over centuries are being engineered elsewhere now.

See also: Iran calls Israeli aggression against Syria dangerous escalation

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