Christian Science Monitor

If there’s one thing political analysts agree on, across the spectrum, it’s this: President Joe Biden is in a slump. Left, right, and center; with young voters, Hispanics, and African Americans, the president’s job approval numbers are in the doldrums – and among key Democratic-leaning voter blocs, some polls show a marked decline.

The spike in gas prices and 40-year-high inflation are prime culprits. So, too, is the pandemic, grinding on into its third year. Russia’s brutal attack on Ukraine has not produced the kind of “rally around the flag” effect that American presidents often enjoy in the initial phases of an international crisis, despite early bipartisan praise for President Biden’s handling of the war.

Political polarization has hardened, analysts say, making it well-nigh impossible for any president to unify the country – a Biden campaign promise that has failed to materialize.

India Today

The government of India has challenged the estimates of the country’s Covid deaths by the World Health Organisation (WHO). The government has raised questions over the validity of the estimate model used by the international public health body.

On Thursday, the world health body that 14.9 million people were killed either by Covid-19 directly or due to the pandemic’s impact on health systems and society, with the global health agency estimating that India had 4.7 million fatalities.

Following the report, India strongly objected to the use of mathematical models by the WHO for projecting excess mortality estimates linked to the coronavirus pandemic in view of the availability of authentic data. The Indian government said that the validity and robustness of the models used and methodology of data collection are questionable.

Srbin.info

This statement came immediately after the request of the Chief Rabbi of Russia that Lavrov apologize for the statement he considers very offensive (while the Chief Rabbi of Moscow suddenly left Russia and went to Israel, claiming that his father fell ill). We remind you that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated a few days ago that the fact that he is a Green [?] Jew does not mean that he is not a Nazi, since Hitler was also of Jewish blood.

“Israeli mercenaries are practically side by side with the militant Azov in Ukraine,” Zaharova told Sputnik radio……..

Israeli media state that Zaharova alluded to Israeli-born Israelis and Israeli natives who traveled to Ukraine to join volunteer units after the Russian offensive in February.

It is believed that there are at least several hundred Israeli volunteers in Ukraine, but there are no accurate data on how many there are.

 No-touch Torture:

As the person is not assaulted, the reasoning goes, the ‘‘severity of pain and suffering’’ criterion (here meaning physical only) is not met. This line of
argumentation is effectively used to manipulate wider public opinion, which has largely come to consider torture to be mainly a ‘‘physical phenomenon’’, thus accepting the (flawed) reasoning that without physical assault there is no torture.The psychological effects of torture – that is, of all methods combined, both physical and psychological, described in detail in the Istanbul Protocol and many other medical publications – are well known.39

Those most frequently encountered are
re-experiencing the trauma (flashbacks, nightmares, stress reactions, mistrust
– even of family members – bordering on paranoia);
avoidance of anything recalling the torture experience (also called emotional
numbing);
hyper-arousal (irritability, sleep difficulties, hyper-vigilance, constant anxiety,
difficulties in concentrating);
depressive symptoms, and what is known as depersonalization (acknowledged atypical behaviour, feeling detached from one’s body).

BBC.com

CATEGORICAL AFFIRMATION OF APOLOGY

NDTV.com

New Delhi:

Calling the relationship between India and Israel “truly special”, External Affairs Minister (EAM) S Jaishankar on Thursday said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Israel in 2017 was a “goosebump moment” for him.
Mr Jaishankar made the remarks while addressing the gathering here for the celebration of 74 years of independence of Israel.

“When I look back at our relationship, in the last several years that I have been associated with, for me the goosebumps moment in a way was at Tel Aviv when the PM visited Israel in July 2017, first Indian PM to visit Israel. And, since then our relationship has really taken off,” the EAM said.

Mr Jaishankar said that both the countries are focussing on expanding the knowledge-based relationship which includes cooperation in innovation and research. He further said that Israel is an integral part of the ‘Make in India’ initiatives.

Talking about the future prospects, Mr Jaishankar mentioned, “As I see the future of this relationship for me one of the most encouraging signs is intellectual, students in huge numbers are going from here to there, research project we are doing.”

Mr Jaishankar also touched upon the aspect of the new Quad consisting of India, Israel, UAE, and the US, where he hoped this group can play an important role in expanding economic cooperation in that region.

CNBC

Intelligence shared by the U.S. British and Israelis helped Ukraine sink the Russian cruiser Moskva, U.S. officials told NBC News, confirming an American role in perhaps the most embarrassing blow to Vladimir Putin’s troubled invasion of Ukraine.

A guided-missile cruiser carrying a crew of 510, the Moskva was the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. It sank on April 14 after being struck by two Ukrainian Neptune anti-ship missiles, U.S. officials said. Moscow said the vessel sank after a fire.

The attack happened after Ukrainian forces asked the Americans about a ship sailing in the Black Sea south of Odesa, U.S. officials told NBC News. The U.S. identified it as the Moskva, officials said, and helped confirm its location, after which the Ukrainians targeted the ship.

The U.S. did not know in advance that Ukraine was going to target the Moskva, officials said, and was not involved in the decision to strike.

Times of Israel, August 17, 2019

A prominent religious-Zionist rabbi known for his extremist views suggested on Wednesday that the fire that gutted the famed Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris earlier this week may have been divine retribution for the mass-burning of Talmud volumes by French Catholic priests in the city eight centuries earlier.

Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, the rabbi of the Beit El settlement and head of the Ateret Yerushalayim yeshiva, said that Jews should not commit arson against churches, but also that there was no duty to be saddened by the fire, which gutted the famed 12th-century cathedral.

He made the comments to the religious-Zionist website Srugim as part of a question-and-answer column (Hebrew).

The Corbett Report, h/t to LRC

The Libya Intervention

The WMD story blew up in the neocons’ face shortly after the war, but by that time they had already succeeded in their plan to reshape the Middle East. But for the would-be controllers of public opinion, a valuable lesson was learned: “Human rights” and “protecting the innocent” is a more effective lie to sell to the public to motivate them for war. So when it came time to sell the war on Libya to the public, the UN-backed, NATO-led aggressors once again donned the cloak of “human rights” by turning to none other than the UN’s Human Rights Council.

The process that launched the intervention was begun by a coalition of 70 non-governmental organizations, which issued a joint letter urging the UN to suspend Libya from the Human Rights Council and for the Security Council to invoke the so-called “responsibility to protect” principle in protecting the Libyan people from alleged atrocities being committed by the Libyan government.

In a special session on the issue on February 25th, 2011, the UN Human Rights Council adopted a resolution affirming the NGOs’ recommendations. The resolution was adopted without a vote.

The Security Council immediately passed resolutions 1970 and 1973, authorizing the establishment of a “no-fly zone on Libyan military aviation” for the “protection of civilians” and the “delivery of humanitarian assistance.” Three days later, using the resolution as its justification, the US, UK and France began bombing the population of Libya.

Meanwhile, the International Criminal Court’s Chief Prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, began working on the legal basis for the invasion. He drafted the request for the Court’s judges to issue an arrest warrant for Gaddafi for crimes against humanity. Although NATO forces were already engaged in an invasion of the country on the basis of undocumented allegations by a group of NGOs, Moreno-Ocampo’s request was not issued until May 16th.

On June 28th, the day after the judges agreed to issue the warrant, Moreno-Ocampo participated in a press conference in which one reporter asked about the evidence that Gaddafi had ever engaged in the atrocities he was accused of.

LUIS MORENO-OCAMPO: I advise you to read the application of the prosecutor’s office. Many pages. I think it was 77 pages. We describe in detail the facts. Most of it is public and the judges also decided on the evidence. So of course we are prosecutors and judges, so we rely on facts, so we prove the crimes. That’s what we did.

SOURCE: Lies behind the “Humanitarian War” in Libya: There is no evidence! (Part 2), NATO Crimes In Libya

Although the document that Moreno-Ocampo urges the public to read to understand the evidence of Gaddafi’s crimes is indeed public, and is 77 pages long, the version made available to the public has been heavily redacted. In fact, of the 77 pages, 54 of them have been redacted, comprising the entire section of the document dealing with the evidence for the charges themselves.

The most sickening part of this war lie is just how obvious it was. No one involved in this charade cared about the well-being of the Libyan people. Not the press, not the politicians, not the ICC prosecutors. And as a result, today, seven years after the destruction of Libya at the hands of the United Nations-sanctioned NATO “saviours,” open-air slave markets are running in the country that the human rights crusaders once pretended to care about.