shreddy_scientist

Stronger Law Needed to Govern Weapon with Cruel Effects

Geneva - Countries concerned by the severe physical, psychological, socioeconomic, and environmental harm caused by incendiary weapons should work to strengthen the international law that governs them, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. States party to the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) should condemn the use of incendiary weapons and agree to assess the adequacy of the treaty’s Protocol III on Incendiary Weapons when they hold their annual meeting at the United Nations in Geneva from November 13 to 15, 2024.

“Governments should seize the moment to reiterate their concerns about incendiary weapons and discuss ways to strengthen the law to better protect civilians. A complete ban on incendiary weapons would undoubtedly have the greatest humanitarian benefits.”

The billionaire CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, has said it “really doesn’t matter” who wins the US presidential election, because both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris will be good for Wall Street.

“I’m tired of hearing this is the biggest election in your lifetime. The reality is over time it doesn’t matter”, said BlackRock chief Larry Fink at an October 21 conference hosted by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, according to the Financial Times.

“It really doesn’t matter”, Fink reiterated. He revealed that, at BlackRock, “we work with both administrations and are having conversations with both candidates”.

BlackRock has $11.5 trillion assets under management, making it the biggest investment company on Earth.

Israeli strikes in Jabalia, northern Gaza, killed over 50 children in just 48 hours, the UN’s child relief agency, UNICEF, said in a statement on Saturday.

“This has already been a deadly weekend of attacks in North Gaza. In the past 48 hours alone, over 50 children have reportedly been killed in Jabalia, where strikes leveled two residential buildings sheltering hundreds of people,” said UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell.

Earlier this month, the New York Times (10/12/24), Washington Post (10/12/24), and Wall Street Journal (10/12/24) each published front-page articles based on different sets of documents handed to them by the Israeli military.

Israel claims it seized all the documents—in the form of meeting minutes, letters and planning documents—in its ground invasion of Gaza, and that they reveal insights into Hamas’s operations prior to the October 7 attacks. The documents include alleged evidence of Hamas’s pre-10/7 coordination with Iran, plans to blow up Israeli skyscrapers, and even a scheme to use horse-drawn chariots in an attack from Gaza.

Documents received directly from intelligence agencies should always be treated with skepticism, and that’s especially true when their government has a well-documented history of blatant lying. Yet leading newspapers took these Israeli document dumps largely at face value, advancing the agenda of a genocidal rogue state.

This immense concentration of wealth inevitably renders any semblance of democracy almost useless, as the main decision makers are those who hold the biggest bag. “Whoever we elect as President is not going to make any difference because they’re managed by capital,” Phillips tells Scheer.

“They’re there to protect global capital. That’s what the American political system is about. That’s what the political systems in the West are about. They see capital as a vital interest of the West, and that’s why we have military bases all over the world to protect capital and to ensure that debts get repaid and that this capital continues to grow and expand.”