US Foreign Policy Is a Scam Built on Corruption

The $1.5 trillion in military outlays each year is the scam that keeps on giving—to the military-industrial complex and the Washington insiders—even as it impoverishes and endangers America and the world.


US ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield abstains during a vote to approve a resolution that "demands" all sides in the Israel-Hamas conflict allow the "safe and unhindered delivery of humanitarian assistance at scale" at UN headquarters in New York on December 22, 2023.
(Photo by Charly Triballeau / AFP via Getty Images)

JEFFREY D. SACHS
Dec 26, 2023

Common Dreams

On the surface, US foreign policy seems to be utterly irrational. The US gets into one disastrous war after another -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and Gaza. In recent days, the US stands globally isolated in its support of Israel’s genocidal actions against the Palestinians, voting against a UN General Assembly resolution for a Gaza ceasefire backed by 153 countries with 89% of the world population, and opposed by just the US and 9 small countries with less than 1% of the world population.

In the past 20 years, every major US foreign policy objective has failed. The Taliban returned to power after 20 years of US occupation of Afghanistan. Post-Saddam Iraq became dependent on Iran. Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad stayed in power despite a CIA effort to overthrow him. Libya fell into a protracted civil war after a US-led NATO mission overthrew Muammar Gaddafi. Ukraine was bludgeoned on the battlefield by Russia in 2023 after the US secretly scuttled a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine in 2022.

To understand the foreign-policy scam, think of today’s federal government as a multi-division racket controlled by the highest bidders.

Despite these remarkable and costly debacles, one following the other, the same cast of characters has remained at the helm of US foreign policy for decades, including Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, and Hillary Clinton.

What gives?

The puzzle is solved by recognizing that American foreign policy is not at all about the interests of the American people. It is about the interests of the Washington insiders, as they chase campaign contributions and lucrative jobs for themselves, staff, and family members. In short, US foreign policy has been hacked by big money.

As a result, the American people are losing big. The failed wars since 2000 have cost them around $5 trillion in direct outlays, or around $40,000 per household. Another $2 trillion or so will be spent in the coming decades on veterans’ care. Beyond the costs directly incurred by Americans, we should also recognize the horrendously high costs suffered abroad, in millions of lives lost and trillions of dollars of destruction to property and nature in the war zones.

The costs continue to mount. US Military-linked outlays in 2024 will come to around $1.5 trillion, or roughly $12,000 per household, if we add the direct Pentagon spending, the budgets of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, the budget of the Veteran’s Administration, the Department of Energy nuclear weapons program, the State Department’s military-linked “foreign aid” (such as to Israel), and other security-related budget lines. Hundreds of billions of dollars are money down the drain, squandered in useless wars, overseas military bases, and a wholly unnecessary arms build-up that brings the world closer to WWIII.

Yet to describe these gargantuan costs is also to explain the twisted “rationality” of US foreign policy. The $1.5 trillion in military outlays is the scam that keeps on giving—to the military-industrial complex and the Washington insiders—even as it impoverishes and endangers America and the world.

To understand the foreign-policy scam, think of today’s federal government as a multi-division racket controlled by the highest bidders. The Wall Street division is run out of the Treasury. The Health Industry division is run out of the Department of Health and Human Services. The Big Oil and Coal division is run out of the Departments of Energy and Interior. And the Foreign Policy division is run out of the White House, Pentagon and CIA.

Each division uses public power for private gain through insider dealing, greased by corporate campaign contributions and lobbying outlays. Interestingly, the Health Industry division rivals the Foreign Policy division as a remarkable financial scam. America’s health outlays totaled an astounding $4.5 trillion in 2022, or roughly $36,000 per household, by far the highest health costs in the world, while America ranked roughly 40th in the world among nations in life expectancy. A failed health policy translates into very big bucks for the health industry, just as a failed foreign policy translates into mega-revenues of the military-industrial complex.

The more wars, of course, the more business.

The Foreign Policy division is run by a small, secretive and tight-knit coterie, including the top brass of the White House, the CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon, the Armed Services Committees of the House and Senate, and the major military firms including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. There are perhaps a thousand key individuals involved in setting policy. The public interest plays little role.

The key foreign policy makers run the operations of 800 US overseas military bases, hundreds of billions of dollars of military contracts, and the war operations where the equipment is deployed. The more wars, of course, the more business. The privatization of foreign policy has been greatly amplified by the privatization of the war business itself, as more and more “core” military functions are handed out to the arms manufacturers and to contractors such as Haliburton, Booz Allen Hamilton, and CACI.

In addition to the hundreds of billions of dollars of military contracts, there are important business spillovers from the military and CIA operations. With military bases in 80 countries around the world, and CIA operations in many more, the US plays a large, though mostly covert role, in determining who rules in those countries, and thereby on policies that shape lucrative deals involving minerals, hydrocarbons, pipelines, and farm and forest land. The US has aimed to overthrow at least 80 governments since 1947, typically led by the CIA through the instigation of coups, assassinations, insurrections, civil unrest, election tampering, economic sanctions, and overt wars. (For a superb study of US regime-change operations from 1947 to 1989, see Lindsey O’Rourke’s Covert Regime Change, 2018).

In addition to business interests, there are of course ideologues who truly believe in America’s right to rule the world. The ever-warmongering Kagan family is the most famous case, though their financial interests are also deeply intertwined with the war industry. The point about ideology is this. The ideologists have been wrong on nearly every occasion and long ago would have lost their bully pulpits in Washington but for their usefulness as warmongers. Wittingly or not, they serve as paid performers for the military-industrial complex.

There is one persistent inconvenience for this ongoing business scam. In theory, foreign policy is carried out in the interest of the American people, though the opposite is the truth. (A similar contradiction of course applies to overpriced healthcare, government bailouts of Wall Street, oil-industry perks, and other scams). The American people rarely support the machinations of US foreign policy when they occasionally hear the truth. America’s wars are not waged by popular demand but by decisions from on high. Special measures are needed to keep the people away from decision making.

In theory, foreign policy is carried out in the interest of the American people, though the opposite is the truth.

The first such measure is unrelenting propaganda. George Orwell nailed it in 1984 when “the Party” suddenly switched the foreign enemy from Eurasia to Eastasia without a word of explanation. The US essentially does the same. Who is the US gravest enemy? Take your pick, according to the season. Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, Hugo Chavez, Bashar al-Assad, ISIS, al-Qaeda, Gaddafi, Vladimir Putin, Hamas, have all played the role of “Hitler” in US propaganda. White House spokesman John Kirby delivers the propaganda with a smirk on his face, signaling that he too knows that what he is saying is ludicrous, albeit mildly entertaining.

The propaganda is amplified by the Washington think tanks that live off of donations by military contractors and occasionally foreign governments that are part of the US scam operations. Think of the Atlantic Council, CSIS, and of course the ever-popular Institute for the Study of War, brought to you by the major military contractors.

The second is to hide the costs of the foreign policy operations. In the 1960s, the US Government made the mistake of forcing the American people to bear the costs of the military-industrial complex by drafting young people to fight in Vietnam and by raising taxes to pay for the war. The public erupted in opposition.

From the 1970s onward the government has been far more clever. The government ended the draft, and made military service a job for hire rather than a public service, backed by Pentagon outlays to recruit soldiers from lower economic strata. It also abandoned the quaint idea that government outlays should be funded by taxes, and instead shifted the military budget to deficit spending which protects it from popular opposition that would be triggered if it were tax-funded.

It has also suckered client states such as Ukraine to fight America’s wars on the ground, so that no American body bags would spoil the US propaganda machine. Needless to say, US masters of war such as Sullivan, Blinken, Nuland, Schumer, and McConnell remain thousands of miles away from the frontlines. The dying is reserved for Ukrainians. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) defended American military aid to Ukraine as money well spent because it is “without a single American service woman or man injured or lost,” somehow not dawning on the good Senator to spare the lives of Ukrainians, who have died by the hundreds of thousands in a US-provoked war over NATO enlargement.

This system is underpinned by the complete subordination of the U.S. Congress to the war business, to avoid any questioning of the over-the-top Pentagon budgets and the wars instigated by the Executive Branch. The subordination of Congress works as follows. First, the Congressional oversight of war and peace is largely assigned to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, which largely frame the overall Congressional policy (and the Pentagon budget). Second, the military industry (Boeing, Raytheon, and the rest) funds the campaigns of the Armed Services Committee members of both parties. The military industries also spend vast sums on lobbying in order to provide lucrative salaries to retiring members of Congress, their staffs, and families, either directly in military businesses or in Washington lobbying firms.

It is the urgent task of the American people to overhaul a foreign policy that is so broken, corrupted, and deceitful that it is burying the government in debt while pushing the world closer to nuclear Armageddon.

The hacking of Congressional foreign policy is not only by the US military-industrial complex. The Israel lobby long ago mastered the art of buying the Congress. America’s complicity in Israel’s apartheid state and war crimes in Gaza makes no sense for US national security and diplomacy, not to speak of human decency. They are the fruits of Israel lobby investments that reached $30 million in campaign contributions in 2022, and that will vastly top that in 2024.

When Congress reassembles in January, Biden, Kirby, Sullivan, Blinken, Nuland, Schumer, McConnell, Blumenthal and their ilk will tell us that we absolutely must fund the losing, cruel, and deceitful war in Ukraine and the ongoing massacre and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, lest we and Europe and the free world, and perhaps the solar system itself, succumb to the Russian bear, the Iranian mullahs, and the Chinese Communist Party. The purveyors of foreign policy disasters are not being irrational in this fear-mongering. They are being deceitful and extraordinarily greedy, pursuing narrow interests over those of the American people.

It is the urgent task of the American people to overhaul a foreign policy that is so broken, corrupted, and deceitful that it is burying the government in debt while pushing the world closer to nuclear Armageddon. This overhaul should start in 2024 by rejecting any more funding for the disastrous Ukraine War and Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. Peacemaking, and diplomacy, not military spending, is the path to a US foreign policy in the public interest.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


JEFFREY D. SACHS is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of "A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism" (2020). Other books include: "Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable" (2017) and "The Age of Sustainable Development," (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.

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Haley Shows the GOP Base Is All About Racism and Oligarchy


As Nikki Haley well knows, the Confederacy rose up not simply to preserve slavery and the Southern oligarchy, but to extend that oligarchy to the rest of the United States.


Former UN ambassador and 2024 presidential hopeful Nikki Haley speaks at a campaign town hall event at Hilton Garden Inn in Lebanon, New Hampshire on December 28, 2023. 

(Photo by Joseph Prezioso / AFP) 


THOM HARTMANN
Dec 30, 2023ThomHartmann.Com

First, a curious person in her New Hampshire town hall this week asked Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, “What caused the Civil War?”

You could almost see the gears turning in her head, as she backs away from the questioner and takes a long pause, knowing that if she says “slavery” she’ll offend the white racist base of the GOP.

Ron DeSantis, after all, had to go so far as to change the curriculum in Florida’s public schools to assert that enslaved people “learned skills” that “could be applied for their personal benefit.”

Haley, of course, is no idiot. She was governor of South Carolina, the first state to secede from the union after Abe Lincoln was elected president in 1860. Her state’s December 20, 1860 Declaration of Secession lays it out clearly:
The right of property in slaves was recognized by giving to free persons distinct political rights, by giving them the right to represent, and burthening them with direct taxes for three-fifths of their slaves; by authorizing the importation of slaves for twenty years; and by stipulating for the rendition of fugitives from labor.

We affirm that these ends for which this government was instituted have been defeated, and the government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the nonslaveholding states.

Those states have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in 15 of the states and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other states.

They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.


So, lamely, Haley recites the ancient Southern excuse, that slavery was merely capitalism, that “freedom” means the freedom of white people to own other human beings:
I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run—the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.

I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are. And I will always stand by the fact that I think government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people. It was never meant to be all things to all people.

Government doesn’t need to tell you how to live your life. They don’t need to tell you what you can and can’t do. They don’t need to be a part of your life. They need to make sure that you have freedom. We need to have capitalism. We need to have economic freedom. We need to make sure that we do all things so that individuals have the liberties so that they can have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to do or be anything they want to be without government getting in the way.


When she was called out on it by the questioner, who said he was “astonished” that her answer didn’t mention slavery, she tried to be glib, asking rhetorically, “What do you want me to say about slavery?”

When the gaffe went viral, Haley tried to clean it up by saying that “of course” slavery was a cause of the Civil War, and, later, blaming the “gotcha” question on a “Democratic plant” who’d sneakily inserted himself into her town hall.

The simple reality is that the pro-slavery South is still very much with us, and is still—after 163 years—trying to make the case that democracy should be replaced with a strongman white supremacist oligarchy.

As I wrote in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, the South had ceased to be a democracy by the 1830s and by the time of the Civil War was a full-blown police state run by a few thousand morbidly rich families who lived and acted like the feudal lords of ancient Europe.

And, most interesting, a disruptive new technology—the invention of the cotton gin—drove the process.

Just as the agricultural revolution birthed humanity’s first documented oligarchies, the invention of the cotton gin and its widespread use by 1820 birthed the first American oligarchy, one that eventually rose up and challenged democracy itself in a bloody Civil War.

The backstory is fascinating, and helps us understand Nikki Haley’s blithering. Today’s Republicans are using the new technology of social media to try to impose a 21st century version of the Confederate oligarchy and its exploitation of poor people.

From the century of the American Revolution until the early 1800s, the main sources of power that fueled America were twofold: wood and human labor.

In the North, that labor was often supplied by European convicts or indentured European immigrants who committed to a certain number of years of free labor in exchange for transportation from Europe, or simply by poor immigrants willing to do pretty much any job for very low pay.

As transatlantic commerce exploded through the late 1700s and early 1800s, the increasing numbers of ships brought with them a dramatic decrease in the cost of the trip for a new immigrant from Europe to America.

More and more people could avoid an indenture and simply pay their own way, so during this period, indentured servitude in the North pretty much faded away, replaced in some areas by prison labor but most often replaced by cheap immigrant labor.

In the South, these forms of labor existed, but on the plantations where the only way to pick and clean cotton was with fingers and hands, the labor was mostly supplied by enslaved people of African ancestry.

Then came a technological change that had as much impact on the South as Gutenberg’s printing press did on Europe centuries before and social media is having on us today.

It transformed the economics of the South from a hardscrabble existence into one of opulence and great wealth in a very few hands; changed the culture of the South from one that was apologetic for slavery and oligarchy into one that openly called both good things that should spread across the rest of the nation and around the world; and changed the politics of the South from a mostly democratic republic into an openly tyrannical autocracy.

Where Cotton Is King, Cotton Makes Kings

Cotton could be a reliably profitable crop for the Southern plantation owners; it was easy to grow, it could be stored for years if necessary, and there was worldwide demand for it. Its biggest problem was the seeds.

What we call cotton is a fibrous part of the “fruit” of the cotton plant. After the flower is pollinated, the seeds form and mature in a pod or boll along with a protective superstructure of thin fibers that we call cotton.

Picking cotton is work that in the period from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War was never automated, so it required a fair amount of human labor. Far more difficult, though, was the process of disentangling the cotton seeds from the cotton fibers that surrounded them. It could take an entire day for a person to clean a single pound of cotton by hand.

In 1794, Eli Whitney figured out how to make a drum into which raw cotton could be dumped, then spun with hundreds of tiny hooks that would pull the cotton fibers out through a mesh. The mesh was too fine for the seeds to pass through, so as the drum turned, the cotton accumulated outside it, leaving behind in the drum nothing but seeds.

Whitney wrote to his father:
One man and a horse will do more than fifty men with the old machines.... Tis generally said by those who know anything about it, that I shall make a Fortune by it.


His “cotton gin” (“gin” was short for “engine”) took the South by storm in the first two decades of the 1800s. Its biggest impact, though, was on the fate of democracy in the South.

Now that one machine could clean as much cotton as 50 people, every cotton plantation faced the possibility that it could produce 50 times as much cotton (and profit), if only it had 50 times as much land to grow the cotton on and 50 times as many people to pick it.

The wealthiest among the Southern plantation owners began to buy up small farms and plantations the way big agricultural corporations would later buy out American Midwestern farmers when Reagan stopped enforcing America’s anti-monopoly laws in the early 1980s.

The smaller farmers who couldn’t afford a cotton gin were faced with financial ruin from their giant competitors, and they didn’t have Willie Nelson to sing “Farm Aid” fundraising concerts to help them buy equipment to compete.

Like Midwestern farmers in the 1980s, the smaller Southern cotton farmers either sold out or were bankrupted and driven off their land; many became tenant farmers on what had previously been their own property.

Illinois’ Rep. John Farnsworth noted the trend in his 1864 speech on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives:
[With t]he invention of the cotton gin, the cultivation made it profitable to raise men and women for the Southern market. The price of slaves was enhanced; from being worth $250 they went up to $1,200 and $1,300.

Then the greed for power took possession of the slaveholders, and the avarice of these men overleaped itself and they became clamorous for the extension of slavery. The bounds were too narrow for them. They became ambitious of a nation that should be founded upon ‘the cornerstone of slavery.’

Then it was, Mr. Speaker, that the slave power got the control of the Government, of the executive, legislative, and judicial departments. Then it was that they got possession of the high places of society. They took possession of the churches. They took possession of the lands. Then it became criminal for a man to open his lips in denunciation of the evil and sin of slaveholding.

Then followed... the attempt to expel John Quincy Adams; the throttling of the right to petition; suppressing the freedom of the press; the suppression of the freedom of the mails; all these things followed the taking possession of the Government and lands by the slave power, until we were the slaves of slaves, being chained to the car of this slave Juggernaut...

Then came the conventions of the rival political parties, in which they declared that the agitation of this vexed question should cease. But it would not cease, for the slave power was still clamoring for more, more, more!

Then came the [Dred Scott] decision of the Supreme Court. Why, sir, the spirit of slavery took possession of that court and instigated the palsied arm of a judge upon the brink of the grave to attempt to snatch the charter of human liberty from the throne of the Almighty.


The Southern oligarchs were on the rise.

The Oligarchs’ War

By the 1830s, with the recent death of nearly every member of the Founding generation and the rise of plantation oligarch Andrew Jackson’s vice president, John C. Calhoun, and his nullification crisis, the South was firmly in the economic, political, and social hands of a small number of uberwealthy plantation-based oligarchs made fabulously rich by the invention of the cotton gin.

In 1913, looking back on the 1787 Constitutional Convention, historian Henry Leffmann wrote:
Some of the members of the Convention doubtless believed that the question [of slavery] would settle itself thru the evolution of labor conditions. Ellsworth, of Connecticut, said, ‘Let us not intermeddle. As the population increases, poor laborers will be so plenty as to render slaves useless.’ This result might have been attained much earlier than it was if the cotton-gin had not been invented.


As Forrest A. Nabors wrote in his brilliant book From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction:
A new generation of rulers reshaped the South around their new ruling principle... The development of Southern oligarchy portended the rupture of the union, regardless of the ties that bound them together, because no ties, physical, legal, or otherwise, can overcome the difference between fundamentally opposed types of political regimes.


And it was the technological revolution that Eli Whitney had birthed that gave them the wealth and power to try to pull it off.

Wisconsin Sen. Timothy Howe laid it out in an 1864 speech on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives:
If the cotton gin had not been invented, slaveholding would not have been profitable. If slaveholding had not been profitable, slaveholders would not have been rich. If slaveholders had not been rich, they would not have been arrogant. If they had not been arrogant, four hundred thousand slaveholders would not have presumed to challenge dominion over 20 million freemen.

Slavery without the cotton gin would have been a monster wrong, but it would not have been dangerous to the republic. The cotton gin without slavery would have been of twice the value it has been and still would not have been dangerous to anyone. Together they have proved fatal to the peace of the nation.


On December 18, 1860, Tennessee Sen. Andrew Johnson (soon to be vice president and then president) said on the floor of the Senate, speaking in favor of the right of the Southern states to secede:
When the Union was formed, 12 of the 13 states were slaveholding; and if the cotton gin had not been invented, there would not probably today have been an African slave in North America.


Historian Forrest Nabors extensively cites (and informed me of) Rep. John Farnsworth of Illinois, as well as Sen. Timothy Howe of Wisconsin, who argued that the oligarchy in the South had become so strong that they weren’t just trying to be left alone in the lead-up to the Civil War—they actually wanted to dominate the North.
"Such, then, I find to be the cause and the purpose of the rebellion,” said Howe. “It was not to secure toleration for slavery within the seceding Slates, but to compel the adoption of slavery by the nation.”


In other words—as Nikki Haley well knows—the Confederacy rose up not simply to preserve slavery and the Southern oligarchy, but to extend that oligarchy to the rest of the United States.

The South has, since the 1830s, been the epicenter of an anti-democratic, anti-American plot to replace our representative government with rule by the morbidly rich.

And they’ve been doing it by creating a caste system in America and using new technologies to keep it in place so they can exploit the labor of non-white, imprisoned, and poor workers.

Which explains why Nikki Haley had such a struggle with the question, and the media largely dances around efforts to explain it: oligarchy is the ultimate work today’s Republican Party, relying heavily on the new technology of social media owned by rightwing billionaires.

Unless we stop them at the ballot box this coming November.

© 2023 Thom Hartmann

THOM HARTMANN
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream" (2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America" (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.
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Scientist pays homage to Egyptian icon Imhotep


Physics lecturer and DJ Dr Mark Richards is on a mission to boost the numbers of Black STEM academics

MISSION: Scientist and DJ Dr Mark Richards

SCIENTIST AND DJ Dr Mark Richards credits ancient Egyptian Imhotep as his inspiration for taking his physics career to the next level. Physician, musician, and astronomer Imhotep, who lived in Nubia, southern Egypt, over 4,500 years ago, invented the first step pyramids.

Dr Richards insists Imhotep, who served under pharaoh Djoser as his high priest, is proof that Black people made huge strides in science “from the very start”.

These historical achievements stand in stark contrast to the present day, in which there are officially no Black chemistry or physics professors in the UK.

Dr Richards, physics lecturer at Imperial College London, is on a mission to change this and has helped drive forward a Royal Society fellowship scheme to take Black postgraduates to the next level.

“I read about Imhotep when I was doing my PhD and when I read about this guy doing all these things, even though it was from 4,500 years ago, it’s quite clear that we’ve been involved in science from the very beginning[1]ning”, Dr Richards told The Voice.

Founder of The Blackett Lab Family, a network of Black scientists, Dr Richards also DJs under the name DJ Kemist.

INSPIRATIONS: Imhotep, who lived in Egypt over 4,500 years ago, invented the first step pyramids

“I was an undergraduate chemist, but for a long time people just assumed I was a ‘street chemist’”, he laughs. “But no, I’m actually a chemist!”

He added: “We are natural scientists in many ways. Even on the music side, I’ve done workshops around how sound system innovation has worked its way into modern PA systems now.

“It was sound system culture that innovated it. Even sound effects in music, like the foghorns and the sirens.

“In Hip Hop culture there’s also been lots of technical innovation, like the crossfader on a mixer to mix from one disk to another, which was developed by Grandmaster Flash, and he did electronics at high school. Now every mixer has a crossfader.

“The slip-mat is the same sort of thing, to reduce friction so you can scratch and mix records etcetera; that was developed again by Grandmaster Flash.

“His mum was a seamstress, and he got the right type of material and put starch on it to make it more slippery… but what we’re not so good at is saying ‘ah this is a novel idea, let me get this patented so that when everyone else adopts it we make the money from it.’ As a community, we do innovate, we do create; we just don’t seem to own much of what we create.”

In 2021, the Royal Society released a study of Black academics in STEM subjects over a ten-year period, which found that White students were twice as likely as Black students to graduate with First class honours. Black students were also three times more likely than White students to pick up a third-class degree.

The degree results contrast with the fact these Black students had got similar grades as their White counterparts to study the courses in the first place.

Experiment

Dr Richards, who was on the Royal Society working group that led the study, commented: “As a scientist, if you’re expecting one result and you’re always getting another result which is consistently below what you’re expecting, then you know that there’s some kind of systemic bias in the system. They’d call it a systemic bias if it was an experiment.

“That bias is not there because Black students are genetically disposed to under-performing, so it must be something.

“There is higher attrition rate as you go through the pipeline; the more you go into these elite spaces, the less likely you are to see yourselves in those spaces.”

According to the Higher Education Statistics Authority there are no Black chemistry or physics professors in Britain, however Dr Richards says there are a couple. However, the figures are rounded down to zero when numbers are less than five to avoid people being identified.

Grandmaster Flash, who studied electronics at high school, developed the crossfade

The Royal Society initiative aims to tackle these disparities by offering five fellowships per year worth £680,000 per recipient, which will allow them to establish their own research teams.

Dr Richards paid homage to African American professor James ‘Jim’ Sylvester Gates, an expert in string theory physics — the study of subatomic string particles holding the universe together — for using west African Adinkra symbols in his work, to ensure the footprint of historical African advances lives on.

Conversation

He added: “It was Marcus Garvey who said nearly a hundred years ago: ‘To parents, you must teach the higher developments of science in your homes, for with science and religion is our only hope of withstanding the evil designs of modern materialism.’

“Now if you look at where we are today, if we think about the role that science and technology plays increasingly in pretty much every aspect of our lives, if we are not part of that conversation, then we’ll just end up becoming consumers or slaves to technology, and that’s it.

“It’s almost like another form of slavery, technological slavery, with things imposed on us and we have no real idea of what it’s really doing. “But if we are part of that conversation, we can at least stand a chance of doing what’s good for us.”

Kenya’s Haiti mission: African help or covert US imperialism?

As the Caribbean nation teeters on the brink, American-backed moves to send 1,000 Kenyan troops there are condemned

THE VOICE

HOPE FOR Haiti continues to be elusive as the Caribbean country finds itself engulfed in a horrific security crisis.

Following the assassination of President Jovenel Moise in 2021 by Colombian mercenaries, a huge power vacuum has opened up which has been filled by over 200 gangs, 100 of which have taken over the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince.

To compound the problem further, earlier in the year the terms of Haiti’s last remaining senators expired, leaving the country without elected government officials. This all occurred as a hurricane of devastating catastrophes all hit the country at once.

Half of all Haitians are in desperate need of aid as the country is currently struggling with the worst famine in its history, cholera outbreaks, fuel shortages and another economic crisis that all intersect to tear the country apart.

Various gangs have taken over parts of the country and completely overwhelmed the Haitian police force. An estimated two million people now live in areas under gang control.

Over 195,000 people have been internally displaced. Reports have indicated that over 2,400 people have been killed this year and between July 1 and September 30, 2023, over 1,239 murders have occurred compared to 577 in the same period last year.

From July to September, 701 people have been kidnapped, and 388 people have been lynched for alleged membership in gangs between April and September, as Haitians are increasingly taking matters into their own hands as frustration builds up with the ineffectiveness of the government and police force.

Catastrophic

For over a year, the Haitian government, led by the widely unpopular acting president Ariel Henry, has been calling on the United Nations and United States to send assistance to the weakened government. Up until recently, most countries have been reluctant to intervene, with previous attempts by the United States and Brazil widely being unpopular and in many cases catastrophic for the beleaguered country.

After months of the United Nations putting out a request among member states to set up and lead a security mission to Haiti, an unlikely country has offered its assistance. The East African country of Kenya under President William Ruto has offered to provide a task force of over 1,000 troops to tackle the security situation in the Caribbean country.
TALKS: US President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris host a meeting with members of the Congressional Black Caucus (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

This will mark the first deployment of international security forces to Haiti in nearly 20 years. The proposal for intervention received 13 votes, with China and Russia abstaining, and the resolution drafted by the United States and Ecuador.

This resolution proposes that Kenyan officers would be able to remain in Haiti for up to a year from January 2024 with a review in nine months. US President Biden has pledged over US$100 million to fund the mission.

President Ruto has cited Kenya’s commitment to Pan Africanism as the ideological and moral reason for intervening in Haiti. The Kenyan president also cited Kenya’s history of peacekeeping missions in Somalia, Kosovo, Namibia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo as credentials for why the East African nation can and should intervene in Haiti.

The move has been welcomed by the United States, the EU and the United Nations which are all reluctant to commit security forces.
Resistance

As the series of coups across West Africa and the Sahel have shown, there is growing resistance across Africa and the diaspora against Western intervention missions, and this is no different among Haitians in the Caribbean.

However, among Kenyans — and especially amongst Haitians — there is great suspicion behind what is motivating an African country to launch an intervention in a Caribbean country, the first of its kind in modern history.

Some Kenyans feel that Ruto made the decision unilaterally in what is seen as a “back door deal with the United Nations”. The move to send security forces to Haiti has been controversial among many Kenyans with the Kenyan High Court barring the deployment for up to two weeks.

The Interior Minister of Kenya appeared before a national assembly committee to argue against the deployment. Many Africans in the diaspora and Kenyans are concerned that sending Kenyan security forces to a country that is relatively unknown to them compared to their immediate East and Central African region is risky.

Even though Caribbean countries such as the Bahamas, Jamaica and Antigua and Barbuda have pledged to send additional security forces, these pledges have not been ratified and there is a concern that Ruto has committed 1,000 Kenyan officers to a dangerous and unnecessary mission.
Strategy

Activists such as Guerline Jozef argue that, geopolitically speaking, the security operation is more of a strategy by the United States to use other countries to conduct overseas missions to serve its interests while avoiding the stigma and label of imperialism. Jozef argues that many Haitians see this as the United States using Kenya as Blackface to enact its agenda.

Haitians are generally tired of foreigners coming in to run their country. Between 2004 and 2017, the UN had sent over 5,000 troops from Brazil who notably attacked supporters of the recently exiled Aristide.

In 2010, following the devastating earthquake, UN-backed troops were responsible for a cholera outbreak due to troops defecating in clean water sources used by Haitians leading to the deaths of over 10,000 Haitians and outbreaks continue to this day.

Questions

UN-backed interventions during this period have been responsible for a series of extrajudicial murders, rape and sexual violence against women and children. This is of particular concern for Haitians because there have been reports of Kenyan troops stationed in Somalia being accused of various human rights violations of which Ruto has not addressed.

In addition, Kenyan troops have been known to open fire on demonstrators in Kenya, and there are questions about how adequate their training will be for ensuring that the dignity and human rights of Haitians is respected.

Many Haitians believe these Kenyan security forces will serve the same purpose as the Brazilian forces 19 years ago, which is to protect certain multinational assets from increasing instability while not doing anything to protect and improve the lives of the Haitian people. While there are some Kenyans and Haitans who welcome any sort of intervention to help a country that has suffered so much, it is understandable there are concerns about this intervention.

There are still many questions to consider such as why has the African Union not given weight to Kenya’s Pan-African intervention. Haiti does need help but is it getting the assistance that Haitians want, or is this the latest in a long history of exploitation that will leave the country trapped in the same cycle of poverty and underdevelopment?

Uganda to start building oil pipeline with pipes from China, as opposition mounts

First 100km of line pipes for the massive cross-border EACOP project have arrived in the port of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania

Environmental and rights groups say pristine ecosystems, biodiversity hotspots, water resources and community land are under threat


Jevans Nyabiage
31 Dec, 2023
SCMP



Uganda is expected to start building the US$5 billion East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) in January after the first shipment of pipes arrived from China, as opposition to the massive project intensifies.

Chinese steel pipe manufacturer Panyu Chu Kong (PCK) Steel Pipe Co – which is contracted to supply the line pipes – delivered the first 100km of pipes on Tuesday.

Ugandan and Tanzanian officials marked their arrival at a storage yard operated by EACOP’s Tanzania logistics partner, Superdoll, at the port of Dar es Salaam.





The shipment means construction of the cross-border 1,443km (896-mile) pipeline can begin. It will carry crude oil from the Lake Albert oilfields in the northwest of Uganda to the Chongoleani peninsula at the port of Tanga on Tanzania’s Indian Ocean coast. Landlocked Uganda aims to deliver its first oil to the international markets by 2025.

Work is already under way on the pumping stations, work camps and storage facilities along the EACOP route as well as the coating plant, which is being built in Tanzania. After coating and welding, the first sections of pipe are due to be laid midway through next year, according to the Petroleum Authority of Uganda.

“The project represents a major inward investment in Uganda and Tanzania,” EACOP, the company overseeing the pipeline’s construction, said in a statement. “EACOP remains committed to delivering this project with the utmost responsibility, contributing to the sustainable growth and prosperity of East Africa.”

The project is facing growing opposition from environmental and rights groups that say the Ugandan oilfields and the pipeline threaten pristine ecosystems, biodiversity hotspots, water resources and community land. Pressure from campaigners under the StopEACOP slogan has seen many North American, European and Japanese banks and insurers withdraw from the project.

Uganda is now increasingly relying on China, which has an outsize role in the country’s oil industry – from bankrolling projects to operating an oilfield, drilling oil wells and building key infrastructure such as the pipeline.

Financing of the pipeline is set at a 60:40 debt-to-equity ratio, meaning US$3 billion will be secured as debt with the remaining US$2 billion to be financed by shareholders through equity contributions. Uganda’s Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development permanent secretary Irene Batebe in September said Chinese lenders including the Export-Import Bank of China (Eximbank) and China Export & Credit Insurance Corporation (Sinosure) had agreed to contribute about half of the debts needed to build the pipeline.

Why China is on track to control African mineral transport route via Tazara line
12 Nov 2023


French oil multinational TotalEnergies controls a 62 per cent interest in the pipeline; the Uganda National Oil Company holds 15 per cent; Tanzania Petroleum Development Corporation has 15 per cent; with Chinese oil giant China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) taking an 8 per cent stake. Last year, the issue found its way to the floor of the European Parliament, where legislators passed a resolution calling for a halt to the project over environmental and human rights concerns and warned TotalEnergies against backing the project.

Uganda has an estimated 6.5 billion barrels of crude oil – the equivalent of 1.4 billion barrels of recoverable oil.

CNOOC operates the Kingfisher oilfield, located on the eastern shores of Lake Albert in Uganda. It will invest an estimated US$2-3 billion to develop the oilfield, which would produce 40,000 barrels per day at peak production.

The other, larger oilfield is the Tilenga, operated by TotalEnergies, which is estimated to cost between US$4 billion and US$6 billion. It will produce 190,000 barrels per day.

The arrival of the first 100km of pipe (5,600 18-metre sections) comes shortly after a delegation from the Petroleum Authority of Uganda, led by executive director Ernest Rubondo, visited PCK Steel Pipe in Lianyungang in October. “We are committed to ensuring timely delivery and high-quality pipes,” Xie Leshan, the PCK president, said during the visit, which coincided with China’s Belt and Road Initiative forum.



The Ugandan team also met Liu Yongjie, chairman of CNOOC International, in Beijing, discussing progress on the Kingfisher oil project. “This meeting signifies an important development in the ongoing collaboration between Uganda and China in the oil and gas sector,” Rubondo said.

During the trip, the Ugandan delegation also met other Chinese companies contracted to undertake works and services on oil and gas projects in Uganda – Offshore Oil Engineering Co, China Oilfield Services, CenerTech and China Petroleum Pipeline Engineering Co.

The EACOP will have the capacity to pump up to 230,000 barrels of crude oil a day, from western Uganda to the Indian Ocean coastline of Tanzania.

Chinese embassies take security seriously as threats in Africa heat up
4 Nov 2023


Tim Zajontz, a research fellow at the Centre for International and Comparative Politics at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, said earlier that the Ugandan government was under pressure to finance certain budgetary items and development projects after the World Bank decided to freeze new loans in a reaction to Kampala’s anti-gay law enacted in May.

“But at least in the case of the oil pipeline, I would not overemphasise the causal link, since it had become clear long before the row with the World Bank that Western financiers would back away from the pipeline following protests from environmental and human rights organisations,” Zajontz said. “Chinese funding seems to be Kampala’s Plan B.”


Jevans Nyabiage
Kenyan journalist Jevans Nyabiage is the South China Morning Post's first Africa correspondent. Based in Nairobi, Jevans keeps an eye on China-Africa relations and also Chinese investments, ranging from infrastructure to energy and metal, on the continent.

North Korea says unification with South is ‘not possible’

Online News EditorDecember 31, 2023

Seoul, Dec 31 (EFE).- North Korea said it rules out any type of reconciliation or unification with its southern neighbor, according to Sunday state media reports, after the conclusion of an important five-day plenary meeting.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un said he does not consider Seoul a counterpart for reconciliation and unification, saying the neighboring country “has declared (North Korea) as its main enemy, so the party has come to the conclusion that unification is not possible,” he said, news agency KCNA said.

Kim said there must be a “fundamental change” in dealing with South Korea, adding that inter-Korean relations have become those of “two hostile countries” or “countries in a state of combat.”

At last year’s plenary party meeting, Kim called South Korea an “undoubted enemy” and called for an “exponential” increase in the country’s nuclear arsenal and the development of tactical nuclear weapons.

The secretive country also announced that it intends to launch three more spy satellites in 2024, according to state media, after the first successful launch in November by Pyongyang.

North Korea closes 2023 after having displayed its military muscle with several weapons innovations (a nuclear torpedo, a submarine with the capacity to launch several ballistic missiles, its first spy satellite and its first solid fuel intercontinental ballistic missile).

Pyongyang has chosen to strengthen its ties with Beijing and Moscow, which have vetoed new sanctions against the regime and seem to provide it with certain security guarantees in a global framework marked by the wars in Israel and Ukraine. 

EFE

Korean Unification “Impossible” – Kim

Seoul’s policy of “unification by absorption” does not correspond to Pyongyang's principles, Kim Jong-un has said

by RT / December 31st, 2023

FILE PHOTO: North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Lang Son, Vietnam on February 26, 2019 ©  Getty Images / Linh Pham

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has said it is impossible to achieve reunification between Pyongyang and Seoul because South Korea’s principles are directly opposed to those of his country.

Addressing a meeting of the ruling Workers Party, Kim said the two states’ relations had become “hostile to each other” and no longer “consanguineous or homogeneous,” the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported on Sunday.

Kim declared Pyongyang’s approach to national reunification based on “one nation and one state with two systems” to be in sharp contradiction with Seoul’s “unification by absorption” and “unification under liberal democracy.”

South Korea is currently a “colonial subordinate state” whose politics are “completely out of order” and whose defense and security are totally dependent on the US, the agency said, citing Kim.

Kim said Washington had turned Seoul into its military base and nuclear arsenal, and that the number of joint military exercises between the US, South Korea and Japan in 2023 had doubled from last year. He said this fact “clearly shows” that the US is aiming for military confrontation.

Kim argued that “war may break out” on the Korean Peninsula at any time due to the “enemies’ reckless moves.” If Washington and Seoul attempt a military confrontation with Pyongyang, its “nuclear war deterrence will go over to a grave action without hesitation,” Kim stressed.

The remarks followed North Korea’s statement on Wednesday that the military situation on the Korean peninsula had become “extreme” because of “unprecedented” confrontational moves by the US and its regional allies.

In 2018, North and South Korea signed the Comprehensive Military Agreement (CMA), agreeing to “completely cease all hostile acts against each other.” However, last month, Seoul suspended part of it and resumed aerial surveillance. In response, Pyongyang vowed to restore all measures suspended since 2018.

The Korean Peninsula was divided in 1953 after an armistice was signed, halting the hostilities between North and South that had begun three years before. Technically, Pyongyang and Seoul still remain at war.

The RT network now consists of three global news channels broadcasting in English, Spanish, and Arabic. Read other articles by RT, or visit RT's website.

UK

Vigil in London commemorates fallen Healthcare workers and Journalists in Gaza

London’s healthcare workers and journalists held a solemn vigil joined by thousands of supporters demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. The crowd held photos and names of their deceased colleagues in Gaza with a toll of over 300 healthcare workers and almost 100 journalists. The crowd mourned the lack of action taken by the government and emphasised the need for the joining of all voices as one in calling for a ceasefire.

December 31, 2023

NAKBA 2.0
Israeli bombing of Gaza killing and maiming children at a record pace, warn human rights groups

Bel Trew
Sat, December 30, 2023

A wounded child is among those to receive treatment in hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza (AP)

Israel’s bombardment of Gaza has caused a record-breaking number of child casualties and a pace of killing “unseen in a generation”, human rights groups have warned, as Israeli tanks push deeper into the besieged strip.

Israel unleashed a total siege and its heaviest targeting yet of Gaza in retaliation for the 7 October attack by Hamas who killed 1,200 people and took 240 hostages.

Since then, Israeli strikes have killed at least 21,000 people, three-quarters of them women and children, while thousands more are feared trapped under rubble, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run strip.

Israel has questioned the death toll but provided no alternative. Its army has expressed regret for civilian deaths, accusing Hamas of operating in densely populated areas and using civilians as human shields – a charge the group denies.

The speed and intensity of the killings is “record-breaking”, said James Denslow from Save the Children, adding that the charity had estimated more than 30,000 children have been killed or maimed over the past 12 weeks.

They based their calculations on a combination of Gaza ministry of health numbers and UN figures, plus other reports of casualties and those missing on the ground.

“This is the highest number of children killed and maimed in one conflict since 2006 when United Nations records began,” Mr Denslow told The Independent.

“This is also 21 times higher than the number of children killed and maimed in Ukraine last year,” he added.

The UN has verified that 131,311 children have been killed or maimed across conflict situations since 2006. These numbers – which go up to 2022 – are woefully low estimates, particularly in countries such as Syria, where rights groups say accessing the death toll is near impossible.

“But even if we go by the caveated numbers in Gaza, in just over two months they are already a quarter of a way through that total number of children killed and maimed in 17 years,” said Mr Denslow. “For the intensity, it is something I have never seen before.”

Palestinian children wait to receive food cooked by a charity kitchen in Rafah (Reuters)

Jan Egeland, head of the Norwegian Refugee Council, said that aside from the besieged areas of Syria during the worst days of 2015, the “scale of the killing of civilians has not been seen in a generation”.

He said such a child death toll had not likely been recorded since the genocide in Rwanda 30 years ago.

“In an ocean of human misery and in a world that seems to be falling apart, Gaza stands out,” he added.

An Israeli military spokesperson said: “The IDF [Israel Defense Forces] is committed to mitigating civilian harm during operational activity. In that spirit, the IDF makes great efforts to estimate and consider potential civilian collateral damage in its strikes... IDF military lawyers are on hand at all levels of command to ensure that strikes comply with international legal obligations, including proportionality.”

More than 2.3 million people – half of them children – live in Gaza, a tiny 42km strip that even before the war was subject to a crippling 15-year siege by both Israel and Egypt.

The UN has repeatedly begged for a ceasefire saying there are no safe areas within the strip and no way to get out for civilians who have been displaced multiple times since October and are running out of food, water and medical supplies.

Despite international pleas to wind down the attack, including from its ally the US, Israel has only escalated its ground offensive in Gaza in the closing days of the year.

Young children arrive at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis after being injured in Israeli airstrikes (Getty Images)

This week, Israeli tanks thrust deep into central Gaza after days of relentless bombardment that forced tens of thousands of already displaced Palestinian families to flee to the overwhelmed city of Deir al-Balah along the Mediterranean coast.

“Over 150,000 people – young children, women carrying babies, people with disabilities and the elderly – have nowhere to go,” the main UN organisation operating in Gaza, UNRWA, said in a social media post.

Gaza’s health ministry said on Thursday the humanitarian and health conditions of the now 1.9 million displaced people have reached “catastrophic levels beyond description”.

Half of the displaced are children who are now struggling with dehydration, malnutrition, respiratory and skin diseases and extreme cold, the statement added. Some 50,000 pregnant women, meanwhile, are suffering from thirst and malnutrition.

Amid growing alarm, the UN Security Council last week adopted a resolution to boost humanitarian aid but stopped short of calling for a ceasefire after a week of vote delays and intense negotiations to avoid a United States veto.

The US and Israel oppose a ceasefire, believing it would only benefit Hamas. Washington instead supports pauses in fighting to protect civilians and free hostages taken by Hamas.

Palestinian children sit by the fire next to the rubble of a house in Khan Younis (Reuters)

Rights groups say without a proper ceasefire it is impossible to tend to the needs of the civilians under such conditions.

“There are around 300,000 destroyed or damaged housing units. It is impossible to provide emergency shelters and do repairs for more than 1.2 million people,” Mr Egeland said.

Israel has defended its actions, saying it has identified a “humanitarian zone” for civilians in an area called Mawasi – which is smaller than London’s Heathrow airport.

“Mawasi is a ‘moonscape’,” Mr Egeland continued. “You can't put 1.5 million people on the moon without water, without shelter, without toilets.”

Mr Denslow said this deadly combination of the geography of Gaza, the density of demographics, the percentage of children, the use of explosive weapons with a wide area affected, and the ferocity of the hostilities had led to the record-breaking casualty toll.

“Children are unable to get away from the front line. There are no safe places. And the death toll is just the top of the pyramid of harm,” he said.

“Below that are serious life-changing injuries, [and] then the fact that people are homeless.

“Below is the mental health impact this will have. Four out of five children in Gaza were already showing signs of depression before the war, which is the fifth conflict any 15-year-old in Gaza would have experienced.

“Their resilience levels have been shot to pieces by recent history that has no endgame in sight.”

'She's alive, she's alive': Dramatic rescue of 10-month-old who survived Israeli airstrikes in Rafah that killed at least 20

Josh Lederman and Lawahez Jabari
Updated Sat, December 30, 2023 

'She's alive, she's alive': Dramatic rescue of 10-month-old who survived Israeli airstrikes in Rafah that killed at least 20


TEL AVIV — In the Gaza darkness, an airstrike rips through Rafah, where Palestinians from across the Gaza Strip are seeking refuge.

The chaotic aftermath plays out like so many devastating scenes from the Israel-Hamas war so far: Buildings are leveled into piles of smoldering rubble. Neighbors dig with their bare hands searching for survivors. The dead and wounded are frantically ferried away.

But this time, covered by a mattress and trapped by debris, a child is found. She’s just 10 months old, and her name is Tala Rouqah.

NBC News’ team in Gaza witnessed her dramatic rescue on Thursday night, when the Hamas-run Palestinian Health Ministry said more than 20 were killed in an Israeli airstrike in Rafah, in southern Gaza, now a major focus of Israel’s military campaign.

Israel’s military hasn’t said what it was targeting, but has said its bombing campaign is designed to dismantle Hamas’ military abilities and rescue Hamas-held hostages.

When Tala is discovered, she is unconscious, but breathing. Volunteers who show up to rescue her chant, “She’s alive, she’s alive” in Arabic.

Protruding from broken concrete just inches from Tala is her mother’s hand. The rest of her mother is submerged in the rubble.

And just a few feet away is Tala’s father, Ahmad Rouqah, also trapped in the wreckage. With the help of rescuers, he is freed, and ecstatic chants ring out from the men who freed him.

Seconds later, baby Tala is freed, too, and carried to the nearby Kuwaiti Hospital by a neighbor.

The next morning, Ahmad is recovering in a different hospital, where he recalls the moments before the strike.

He says the family had fled their home in Gaza City at Israel’s direction to Khan Younis, the largest city in the south, where they stayed with relatives until civilians in that city, too, were told to evacuate. They fled to Rafah, seeking refuge in a house they said had been abandoned and left vacant for several years.

He says they had just finished worshipping during the evening call to prayer and the women of the family were preparing dinner when the building was struck.

“Why, and for what? Only God knows,” Ahmad tells NBC News in Arabic. He says that nobody in his family was part of what he calls the resistance, a reference to Hamas.

Ahmad takes stock of his loss: His mother and wife have both been killed, he says. His son and another daughter, too. And three of his brothers, and his brother-in-law. In all, he says, at least 10 relatives lost their lives.

“Oh god, help me in my misfortune and bring good from it,” he says. “May god accept them in heaven.”

Rapped by grief, Ahmad has yet to see his daughter, until a cousin collects her from the nearby tent city where she’s being cared for and cradles her in his arms. Tala’s leg is broken and in a cast, but she appears otherwise in generally good condition.

Her cousin brings her to Ahmad’s bedside, where the baby breaks into tears when she sees her father — a mix of agony and relief.

He tries to sit up, but is visibly in pain from his injuries. Young Tala is placed in his arms.

She clings to his chest and is soothed, while her father gently sobs. Father and daughter begin the long journey ahead, as the surviving members of a family united by grief.

“Where is your brother, and sister,” he says. “There’s no one left for us.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com

Gaza death toll climbs amid fierce fighting in south

Euronews
Sat, December 30, 2023 

Palestinian death toll climbs

At least 100 people were killed and 158 injured in central Gaza over the past 24 hours, a Palestinian health official said on Saturday.

In Gaza, at least 21,507 people have now been killed and 55,915 injured in Israeli attacks since October 7.

Some 1,200 people died in Hamas' 7 October attack on southern Israel.
Fierce fighting in Gaza

Intense fighting has been reported between Israeli forces and Hamas militants on Saturday.

Israel is concentrating its military offensive on southern Gaza, particularly around the city of Khan Younis. But it is also conducting operations elsewhere.

In Gaza City, the Israeli Defense Force wrote on X it "eliminated dozens of terrorists" and that "battles took place where further terrorists were eliminated."

On Friday, Israel's Defence Ministry claimed its troops had successfully located and demolished a hideout apartment belonging to Yahya Sinwar, the leader of the Hamas terrorist organization in the Gaza Strip.

A UN official claimed Israeli troops had opened fire on an aid convoy returning from northern Gaza, damaging a vehicle.

Violence is also spilling into the wider region.

Israeli strikes targeted the Damascus airport and Syrian military sites late Thursday and early Friday, causing material losses, according to Syrian sources.

Israel has launched numerous strikes in government-controlled Syria, often targeting Iran-backed groups supporting President Bashar Assad, although Israel rarely acknowledges these actions.
South Africa accuses Israel of genocide

South Africa has initiated a case at the International Court of Justice, accusing Israel of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and requesting an immediate suspension of Israeli military operations.

Israel vehemently rejected these allegations, calling them 'blood libel' and asserting the case's lack of legal or factual basis.

Israel also accused South Africa of cooperating with Hamas, linking it to the cross-border attack that triggered the ongoing conflict.

Other legal cases have been launched against parties involved in the Israel Hamas war.

In December, rights groups took the UK government to court over its arms exports to Israel amid the catastrophic war in Gaza.

Supported by the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP), Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq and UK-based Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) want London to immediately suspend lucrative weapons sales to Israel, claiming there is a "clear risk" they are being used in war crimes.

Gaza civilians devastated by humanitarian crisis

Mercy Corps has warned of famine and disease in Gaza, attributing the crisis to relentless fighting and insufficient humanitarian aid.

The organisation claims that aid deliveries to the besieged Palestinian enclave are inadequate, with half a million people facing "catastrophic hunger and starvation."

Meanwhile, UNICEF has delivered at least 600,000 vaccine doses to Gaza to address the escalating health crisis.

A lack of clean water and basic medical supplies in the territory has contributed to the spread of illnesses.

More than 16,800 infants have missed routine vaccines, and UNICEF, along with WHO and UNRWA, is working to administer the arriving vaccines.

Tens of thousands of vaccines for diseases like polio, tuberculosis, measles, and hepatitis have been confirmed by Israeli officials in coordination with UNICEF.

Hamas-run Health Ministry says 187 killed in one day in Gaza Strip

dpa international
Fri, December 29, 2023 

Palestinian mother Asmaa Naser (C) mourns the bodies of her twin children, Ahmed and Jihan Naser, who were killed after an Israeli air strike on the Nuseirat camp, at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir El-Balah in the central Gaza Strip. Ali Hamad/APA Images via ZUMA Press Wire/dpa


A total of 187 people have been killed in one day in fresh Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip, the Health Ministry controlled by the militant Palestinian organization Hamas said on Friday.

The ministry added that 312 Palestinians were injured.

The total number of Palestinians killed in the Gaza Strip since the start of the war rose to 21,507.

The number was last given on Thursday as 21,320. According to this information, 55,915 other people have been injured.

The figures cannot be confirmed, but the UN and other observers point out that the authority's figures have proven to be credible in the past.

The war was triggered by the worst massacre in Israel's history, carried out by fighters from the Islamist Hamas and other extremist groups on October 7 in Israel near the border with Gaza.

As a result, around 1,200 people were killed on the Israeli side, including at least 850 civilians.

People mourn near the bodies of Palestinians killed after an Israeli raid last night on Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, at Abu Youssef Al-Najjar Hospital. Mohammed Talatene/dpa

People inspect a damaged building after an Israeli raid on Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip as battles continue between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas movement. Mohammed Talatene/dpa

ILLEGAL ZIONIST OCCUPATION 

2023 ‘deadliest year on record’ for children in the West Bank: UNICEF

Lauren Irwin
Fri, December 29, 2023

UNICEF deemed 2023 the “deadliest year on record” for children in the West Bank, with 130 conflict-related deaths.

“This year has been the deadliest year on record for children in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, with conflict-related violence reaching unprecedented levels,” UNICEF Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa Adele Khodr wrote in a statement released Thursday.

Khodr said children in the West Bank have experienced “grinding violence” for years, but the recent intensity has dramatically increased since the onset of war between Israel and Hamas.

UNICEF reported that conflict-related violence has killed 124 Palestinian children and six Israeli children in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since the start of 2023.

UNICEF said a majority of the deaths this year — 83 — happened in the weeks since Oct. 7, when Hamas launched a surprise attack in Israel that killed 1,200 Israelis and prompted a deadly counteroffensive from the Israeli military.

More than 576 children have been injured, and others have reportedly been detained, Khodr said in the statement.

“As the world watches on in horror at the situation in the Gaza Strip, children in the West Bank are experiencing a nightmare of their own. Living with a near-constant feeling of fear and grief is, sadly, all-too-common for children affected,” she said, adding that UNICEF is extremely concerned about the children’s right to life and safety.

In the statement, UNICEF urged parties involved to abide by international human rights laws and protect children from conflict-related violence.

“The suffering of children in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, must not fade into the background of the current conflict — it is part of it,” Khodr concluded.

The UNICEF report came on the same day the United Nations released a report that details the “rapidly deteriorating human rights situation” in the West Bank.

The U.N. found that there were 279 Palestinian deaths in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, by the Israel Security Forces since Oct. 7.

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