Al Mayadeen – June 16, 2024
9,300 Palestinians currently detained in Israeli prisons
Prisoner-related Palestinian organizations have released the latest data on Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons.
The Palestinian Prisoners Society (PPS) says that the Israeli occupation currently holds 9,300 Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons and detention centers.
PPS explained that the Israeli occupation currently holds 250 child prisoners and 74 female prisoners. Although international law bans the incarceration of children, the Israeli occupation has drastically increased the number of children it holds in detention during the war on Gaza.
The latest updated number by PPS excludes Palestinian detainees taken into custody by Israeli occupation forces from the Gaza Strip, according to the announcement made by the Israeli Prison Authority.
The service said that it holds 899 Palestinians from the Gaza Strip under the pretext that they are "unlawful combatants".
Moreover, the occupation currently holds at least 3,400 Palestinians in administrative detention, which is a form of incarceration in which occupation forces detain Palestinians without charging them with supposed crimes. Administrative detention lasts for six months and is subject to indefinite extensions. It is also commonly employed as a scare tactic that aims to punish Palestinians for their political or national views.
PPS also said that around 600 detainees are either serving life sentences or the occupation authorities intend to issue sentences of life imprisonment against them.
More recently, Israeli occupation forces detained three Palestinians from al-Khader town, south of Beit Lahm on Sunday, security sources told the Palestinian New Agency WAFA.
As part of continuous raids of towns in the occupied West Bank, Israeli occupation forces, barged their way into the occupied southern West Bank town, rounding up three residents and ransacking a house and vandalizing it.
U.N. Inquiry on Gaza Finds Israel Committed War Crimes
Including Starvation, Torture and Murder
A new report by a U.N. independent human rights body finds both Israel and Palestinian armed groups have committed war crimes since Hamas’s surprise attack on October 7. The damning U.N. report accuses Israel of using starvation as a method of warfare, forcible transfer and intentionally directing attacks against civilians. It calls on Israeli leaders to immediately end attacks resulting in the killing and maiming of civilians in Gaza, to end the siege, to implement a ceasefire and to pay reparations. The report also calls for the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages held by Hamas.
On Tuesday, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin congratulated Israel’s military chief over Saturday’s raid on the Nuseirat refugee camp, which freed four Israeli hostages. His call to Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant came as the United Nations’ top human rights office said Israel likely committed war crimes during the operation, which killed at least 274 Palestinians. Sixty-four children were among the dead; nearly 700 others were wounded.
Jeremy Laurence, spokesperson for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, said Israel’s actions had left human rights workers “deeply shocked.”
Jeremy Laurence: “Hundreds of Palestinians, many of them civilians, were reportedly killed and injured. The manner in which the raid was conducted in such a densely populated area seriously calls into question whether the principles of distinction, proportionality and precaution, as set out under the laws of war, were respected by the Israeli forces.”
Israel vows to press on in Gaza after UN Security Council approves ceasefire proposal
By Mariya Knight, Mia Alberti, Richard Roth, Abeer Salman and Hamdi Alkhshali, CNN
Israel has vowed to persist with its military operation in Gaza, saying it won’t engage in “meaningless” negotiations with Hamas, shortly after the United Nations Security Council overwhelmingly approved a US-backed ceasefire plan intended to bring an end to the eight-month war.
Israel’s representative to the UN, Reut Shapir Ben-Naftaly, emphasized at a UNSC meeting Monday that her country wants to “ensure that Gaza doesn’t pose a threat to Israel in the future.”
The senior diplomat said the war would not end until all hostages were returned and Hamas’ capabilities were “dismantled,” accusing the Palestinian militant group of using “endless negotiations… as a means to stall for time.”
Her comments came after 14 of the 15 UNSC council members voted in favor of Monday’s US-drafted resolution, with only Russia abstaining – the first time the council has endorsed such a plan to end the war. Israel is not a member of the UNSC, and so did not vote.
The comprehensive three-stage peace deal, which sets out conditions intended to lead to the eventual release of all remaining hostages, in return for a permanent ceasefire and withdrawal of Israeli forces, was first laid out by US President Joe Biden on May 31.
The landmark vote means the UNSC now joins other major global bodies in backing the plan, increasing international pressure on both Hamas and Israel to end the conflict.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who is on a diplomatic trip to the Middle East, said Tuesday that in a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the Israeli leader “reaffirmed his commitment” to the current proposal to secure a ceasefire and hostage release, which is still awaiting an answer from Hamas.
Blinken said that he got an explicit assurance from Netanyahu that he continues to support the deal, and will accept it if Hamas agrees to what is on the table.
Netanyahu has repeatedly and publicly said that his country will press on with the war in Gaza until Hamas is destroyed and the hostages are freed.
But an Israeli statement on Tuesday indicated it was poised to formally sign up to the current ceasefire plan for Gaza, while at the same time maintaining the freedom to keep fighting.
The short communication issued Tuesday, attributed only to an Israeli government official, though widely understood to mean the Prime Minister’s Office, started with an assertion of Israel’s war aims before expressing support for the US-backed proposal currently on the table.
“Israel will not end the war before achieving all its war objectives: destroying Hamas’s military and governing capabilities, freeing all the hostages and ensuring Gaza doesn’t pose a threat to Israel in the future,” it said.
“The proposal presented enables Israel to achieve these goals and Israel will indeed do so,” the statement concluded.
Israel and Hamas react
Hamas welcomed the adoption of the UNSC resolution, saying in a statement it was ready to engage with mediators to implement measures such as the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, prisoner exchange, returning residents to their homes and the “rejection of any demographic change or reduction in the area of the Gaza Strip.”
The resolution says Israel has accepted the plan, and US officials have repeatedly emphasized Israel had agreed to the proposal – despite other public comments from Netanyahu that suggest otherwise.
Even last month, less than an hour after Biden unveiled his proposal, Netanyahu insisted Israel would not end the war until Hamas is defeated.
The United States ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said Monday the US would guarantee Israel follows through with its obligations, while Egypt and Qatar would do the same with Hamas.
“The fighting could stop today,” if Hamas agreed to the deal, she said.
But detailed negotiations to implement its provisions are yet to yield agreement from both Israel and Hamas.
The deal is divided into three phases, according to Thomas-Greenfield. It includes an initial ceasefire, the release of Israeli hostages and the exchange of Palestinian prisoners, and ultimately a permanent end to hostilities and full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, as well as the effective distribution of aid and a major multiyear reconstruction in the strip.
The ambassador also said the deal “rejects any geographical changes” in Gaza and reiterates the commitment for a two-state solution.
The Palestinian UN envoy Riyad Mansour said the Palestinian Authority – which governs the Israeli-occupied West Bank – welcomed the deal as a “step in the right direction,” but said it was up to Israel to implement those measures.
“We want a ceasefire,” he said, adding the “burden is on the Israeli side to implement this resolution.”
“The proof is in the pudding. We will see who are the ones who are interested to see this resolution to become a reality and those who are obstructing it and want to continue the war of genocide against our people,” he added……………………..
Business Insider – June 11, 2024
Russia says it's working with a group of countries
to build a platform that doesn't need the dollar
By Huileng Tan
A group of emerging countries are planning a payments platform to bypass the US dollar, Lavrov announced.
The initiative follows a BRICS summit call for trade in national currencies.
The platform may use digital currency, with more details expected at the Kazan BRICS meeting.
A group of major emerging countries is working on a way around the dollar — but they face an uphill battle to diminish the greenback's dominance.
On Monday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said BRICS countries are developing a payments platform that will allow them to bypass the US dollar, per TASS, a state news agency.
The initiative came from a summit of the BRICS countries in Johannesburg last year where the group — which includes the key members of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — called for more trade and lending in their national currencies.
Lavrov said on Monday that the platform will improve the international monetary system and allow payment in national currencies for mutual trade. Russia is keen to move its trading partners away from the dollar because it faces significant sanctions from the US and its allies.
Details on the platform are scarce, including which countries could use it and when it could be adopted.
Lavrov was speaking at the two-day BRICS Foreign Ministers Meeting, just days after Russia's flagship St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. There, Russian President Vladimir Putin doubled down on his call to phase out the use of the US dollar and other "toxic" currencies.
There may be more traction on this front when the BRICS bloc meets in Kazan, Russia from October 22 to October 24, according to Christopher Granville, the managing director of global political research at GlobalData TS Lombard.
The new BRICS payments system could come in the form of a digital-currency system that allows for central banks to deal with local currency transactions directly, Granville wrote in a May report.
Lavrov himself touted a digital-currency-based settlement system to local media in April.
'Impossible to replace something with nothing'
Countries around the world have been working at diversifying their assets and chipping away at the dominance of the US dollar over fears that — like Russia — they could be shut out of the world's greenback-based financial system should sanctions hit.
Russia, a commodities powerhouse, has been using more rubles for trade. Putin said last week that the ruble now accounts for 40% of Russia's import and export transactions.
However, king dollar is so entrenched and pervasive in the world's financial system that very few people think it can be dethroned.
There are "real geoeconomic headwinds to the dollar," Jared Cohen, the president of global affairs at Goldman Sachs wrote in Foreign Policy on Monday.
Cohen acknowledged a "marginal" move toward de-dollarization but wrote that the world is far from an inflection point where there's a concerted effort to change the dollar-based global financial system.
"The two most significant problems for those advocating wholesale de-dollarization are that it is impossible to replace something with nothing and the United States' competitors do not currently have the capability or will to replace the dollar, even if their rhetoric at times suggests otherwise," he wrote.
Still, Cohen warned that the dollar's supremacy should not be taken for granted. He cited developments in the US, such as fiscal brinksmanship and "unnecessary tariffs," that could erode confidence in the greenback.
On Monday, two American think tank analysts wrote in the Financial Times that "American dysfunction" — political and fiscal — is the real threat to dollar dominance.
Global Research - June 13, 2024
Russia Overtakes Japan as World’s Fourth Largest Economy
By Drago Bosnic
For decades, the political West was resting on its laurels after “winning” the (First) Cold War. It also expanded the tentacles of its malignant power projection to every corner of the world, including Russia itself, where liberal exponents of US/EU/NATO implanted themselves in the Kremlin, ensuring that Moscow’s economic might is ruined, so that the Eurasian giant can never recover, let alone return to superpower status. Keeping Russia down was one of the crucial aspects of the infamous Wolfowitz Doctrine and one of the first documents published by the abominable Clinton administration. This unequivocally imperialist strategy that even many Americans thought was too much ended up killing millions of people across the globe and perpetuated an unprecedented aggression against the world that lasts to this very day.
Keeping Moscow in a subservient state was imperative, a problem that the current Russian leadership had to contend with even after Vladimir Putin became president. It took him and his team at least 10-12 years to cure the Eurasian giant of the (neo)liberal disease in the Kremlin, while the remnants of its power were purged only in 2020, when invaluable constitutional reforms brought back Russia’s sovereignty in full.
As we can imagine, every step in the removal of the exponents of this malignant influence made the political West seethe, resulting in escalating hostility that Moscow inevitably had to respond to at some point. Precisely this happened in early 2022, when the Eurasian giant could finally demonstrate its resurgent power. The special military operation (SMO) was the result of decades of work on restoring Russian sovereignty.
In its aftermath, the political West insisted that Russia was finished. The economy was supposed to be in tatters, while the Kremlin was even expected to default after much of its foreign exchange (forex) reserves were frozen (i.e. stolen) by Western banks. After all this failed, the US-led belligerent power pole tried to impose the laughable price cap on Russian oil, one that even some of the most prominent Western nations tried to circumvent, including Japan and even the pathologically Russophobic United Kingdom. As for the United States, it continued buying Russian commodities while criticizing everyone else who did. Still, through its Kiev regime puppets, the political West launched a virtual total war on Moscow in an attempt to disrupt its economic activity and cause as much damage as possible without engaging it directly.
Once again, it all failed. The Kremlin managed to secure stability despite being forced to conduct the SMO against the entire political West. What’s more, Russia overtook Germany as the worldﾒs fifth and Europeﾒs largest economy, a humiliating defeat for its Western rivals who expected quite the contrary. Berlin did much worse than in decades, while London’s economic performance was at its lowest in over 300 years. And yet, to “add insult to injury”, now even Western data shows that the initial estimates of Moscow’s economic performance were wrong and that it will actually be even better in 2024. Namely, the updated IMF’s forecast of 2.6% GDP growth doubles its previous assessment. According to the Financial Times, this increase of 1.5% is the largest for any economy featured in an update to the IMF’s World Economic Outlook, released on January 30.
Top-ranking Russian officials, including the current Defense Minister Andrei Belousov, expected the economic growth to be stable enough for the Eurasian giant to overtake Japan by 2030. However, what was supposed to happen in no less than six years, actually happened in less than six months. According to the latest data, President Putinﾒs forecast of increased economic growth (over 3.5-4%) not only turned out to be true, but even conservative, although the mainstream propaganda machine attempted to portray it as “too overoptimistic”. However, the only thing that was actually too overoptimistic was the political West’s expectation that the sanctions would work. Namely, according to new updates of the World Bank, Russia has overtaken Japan as the world’s fourth largest economy in terms of GDP PPP (purchasing power parity).
As a metric of economy, it’s a far more suitable way to measure true economic might, unlike the overblown nominal GDP figures that serve only to feed the oversized ego of the US-led political West. It should be noted that less than 10 months after overtaking Germany, Russia also zoomed past Japan, leaving Westerners dumbfounded as to how a country they were told would “collapse under the weight of sanctions” and outright theft of its forex reserves managed to accomplish such a feat. Worse yet (for the political West), some sources estimate that the Eurasian giant currently has the fastest-growing major economy in the world. In addition, even Moscow’s updated projection of overtaking Tokyo (explicitly set for March 2025 by President Putin) turned out to be “too cautious”, as this was accomplished nearly a year earlier.
In other words, much unlike the atrocious Bidenomics, what the bne IntelliNews calls Putinomics turned out to be far more effective, particularly considering the fact that Russia is waging a defensive war against the entire US-led political West. According to the bne IntelliNews report, the Kremlin’s policies are “spurring growth in a new Putinomics”. Apart from the resurgence of investment in defense, “Putin has also launched the National Projects 2.1 program to invest into the civilian economy as well and improve the quality of life for the average Russian, as he made clear in his recent guns and butter speech”. The report further posits that, as a result of Putinomics, “Russiaﾒs poorest regions have been the biggest winners and as bne IntelliNews recently reported, the country’s despair index has fallen to its lowest level ever this year”.
However, while the World Bankﾒs numbers for 2024 put Russia’s and Japan’s economies at $5.95 and $5.87 trillion respectively, the actual discrepancy might be far bigger. Namely, the World Bank also estimates that a whopping 39% of the Russian economy is in the shadows, while the same metric for Japan stands at 10%. In terms of GDP PPP, this would add $2.5 trillion to Russia’s $6.45 trillion PPP-adjusted economic size, which, although still far from India’s $14.6 trillion GDP, further widens the gap with Japan. Expectedly, this economic resurgence is also enabling Moscow to rebuild its Soviet-era military might, resulting in an unprecedented real defense budget of over half a trillion dollars. The political West, powerless to stop Russia’s recovery, now wants to launch a terror campaign to disrupt this.*
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/russia-overtakes-japan-fourth-largest-economy/5859952
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