Mark Curtis sur Twitter : “Remarkable: US has successfully demanded Sudan pay compensation to 17 US personnel killed in 2000 terrorist attack. How many millions of people around the world might claim compensation from US if similar principle were applied to its wars?” / Twitter
▻https://twitter.com/markcurtis30/status/1228411506313891840
Outrage after Jeopardy ! host rules Bethlehem not in Palestine
▻https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/01/jeopardy-episode-palestine-question-uproar-200111165110124.html
The incident took place in round one of the game broadcast on Friday, when Katie Needle was given the clue: “Built in the 300s A.D., the Church of the Nativity”, under the category “Where’s that Church?”.
Needle, a retail supervisor, from Brooklyn, responded that it was in Palestine, but was told her answer was wrong.
One of the other two contestants, Jack McGuire, then buzzed in with the reply “Israel”, which host Alex Trebek accepted as correct.
[...]
The Church of Nativity, declared a World Heritage Site, is located in Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank, which is internationally-recognised as part of Palestine.
Décrocher le portrait de Macron
Fanny, militante du climat, a été libérée après 9 h de garde à vue. Son crime : avoir décroché un portrait de Macron
▻https://reporterre.net/Fanny-militante-du-climat-a-ete-liberee-apres-9-h-de-garde-a-vue-Son-cri
- Actualisation - Mardi 26 février, 18h35 - Après neuf heures de garde à vue, la militante est sortie du commissariat. Son domicile a été perquisitionné en début d’après-midi. Elle est convoquée au tribunal le 2 septembre 2019.
Jeudi 21 février, quatre portraits officiels du président Macron avaient été décrochés dans des mairies à Lyon, mais aussi Paris, Bayonne et Ustaritz, pour dénoncer l’inaction du gouvernement face au dérèglement climatique. Un militant d’Action non violente-COP21 (ANV-COP21) a été placé en garde à vue à Lyon vendredi 22 février, et son domicile a été perquisitionné.
Mairie de Cabestany : un collectif d’activistes « jaune-vert » décroche le portrait du Président Macron
▻https://www.midilibre.fr/2019/02/27/mairie-de-cabestany-un-collectif-dactivistes-jaune-vert-decroche-le-portra
Ce mercredi 27 février, le maire de #Cabestany (P-O), Jean Vila, a vu débarquer dans sa mairie le #Collectif_Action_Non_Violente_COP21 venu « décrocher le portrait officiel du président Macron en tant qu’acte symbolique de #désobéissance_civile ».
Le maire communiste de Cabestany #Jean_Vila posé ensuite avec les militants, sachant qu’il se mettait #hors_la_loi en ayant autorisé cette action, indique L’Indépendant. Ils étaient une quinzaine de membres du Collectif ANV COP 21 à se rassembler ce mercredi 27 février sur le parking du Centre Culturel de Cabestany.
Israeli Law and Banking in West Bank Settlements | Human Rights Watch
▻https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/09/12/israeli-law-and-banking-west-bank-settlements
▻https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/styles/open_graph/public/multimedia_images_2017/201709mena_israel_banks_1.jpg?itok=5qzEOvAE
When faced with such concerns over their banking activities in and with Israeli settlements in the West Bank, Israeli banks have said that they are required by Israeli law to provide those services.
However, Human Rights Watch can find no Israeli domestic law that requires Israeli banks to provide many such settlement-related activities. In other words, Israeli banks could stop many of their settlement-related activities – notably financing new construction, providing mortgages, and operating service points — branches and ATMs – without necessarily incurring adverse domestic legal consequences.
Even if that were not the case, Israeli banks would have a responsibility in all circumstances to seek ways to honor the principles of internationally recognized human rights.
America manages to infuriate both Sunni and Shia — FT.com
▻https://next.ft.com/content/aa1a17dc-3255-11e6-bda0-04585c31b153
But the reasons for Iran’s disaffection are very different. Euphoria greeted the lifting of punishing international sanctions in exchange for Tehran agreeing to externally monitored curbs on its nuclear programme. Iranians saw the chance to re-enter the world and reintegrate with its markets. Foreign investors scented an emerging markets bonanza of a scale last seen when the Soviet empire collapsed.
That optimism has largely evaporated, and the reason goes by the prosaic name of the Office of Foreign Assets Control, a branch of the US Treasury with extraordinary power and extraterritorial reach. International sanctions related to Iran’s nuclear programme have been lifted but #Ofac maintains in place robust “secondary sanctions” on individuals and entities the US accuses of “state-sponsored terrorism”, chief among them the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the regime’s enforcer at home and strike force abroad. Ofac’s sanctions brought Iran to the negotiating table but the economic dislocation they caused enabled the IRGC to build a business empire. Any foreign investor, or bank financing deals with even tangential ties to the revolutionary guard, risks being shut out of the US banking system.
[...]
As Adam Smith of Gibson Dunn, a leading US law firm, explains, Ofac’s power is greater than its formal regulatory role suggests, based on “ambiguity” that makes banks in particular do more than what the law strictly requires. “They have educated international banks to do this,” he says. “We don’t live in a purely legal world.”
Part of that education has been through punitive fines for breaking Iran sanctions, such as the nearly $9bn on BNP Paribas or around $1bn on Standard Chartered. The risk of being cut off from US credit markets is a formidable deterrent to any contact with Iran. “There is no institution so big that it can’t be de-banked,” says Mr Smith.
Some deals, such as Tehran’s plan to purchase more than 100 Airbus jetliners, are supposedly protected by the nuclear accord. Even that deal, requiring billions in credit, is on hold.
Ofac staff, Mr Smith points out, are the “same people who have spent their entire professional lives trying to eliminate access to Iran … and the banks steer clear of them. It’s a dissonance problem as much as a policy one.”
What makes the problem even more intractable is the number of actors, of which the US executive is just one (Ofac accounted for only about $1bn of the BNP Paribas penalty). Aggressive actors on Iran include the US Congress, different layers of the judiciary, state banking regulators, states that divest from companies with links to Iran — the list goes on. Iranian officials looking at Washington probably find their own famously convoluted structure of power straightforward by comparison. But if their leaders feel swindled by the historic nuclear deal, then its future is moot.
American #violence from #Ferguson to #Fallujah | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
▻http://thebulletin.org/american-violence-ferguson-fallujah8220
US policing [...] is increasingly seen by the police themselves as a form of counterinsurgency, designed to control hostile populations whose lives lack value. As if they were operating in Iraq or Afghanistan, US police infiltrate and spy on adversary networks, stop and search people at will, and bust down doors in the middle of the night with guns drawn. Recently the Guardian revealed that Chicago has been operating “the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site”—a detention facility where arrestees, some of them minors, are held off the books, with no recourse to legal advice, and are often shackled for long periods and even beaten during interrogation. Just as US soldiers have killed hundreds of Iraqi civilians for not stopping at checkpoints—which are often poorly marked—so Scott lost his life for running away from a traffic stop.
For people of color and the poor, the United States is becoming a war zone. Anyone skeptical should consider the numbers. Estimates of how many insurgent and civilian foreigners the United States has killed by drone vary; the highest estimate, roughly 5,241 over 13 years, comes from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. That is 403 deaths a year. In the United States, a recent government report revealed that over eight years (2003 through 2009 plus 2011), police killed an average of 928 people each year. That’s more than twice as many as the highest estimate of drone deaths in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Afghanistan combined. (Details of individual deaths can be found at Killedbypolice.net.)
The four American security contractors working for Blackwater Worldwide, who were just sentenced by a US federal judge for randomly killing 14 innocent civilians in Baghdad, claimed to be acting in self-defense, until their story broke down. Likewise, after North Charleston, South Carolina police officer Michael Slager shot Scott in the back as he ran away, Slager reported that they had struggled and that he was acting in self-defense. Had a witness not made a video of Slager shooting Scott in the back as he ran away, we would not have known the truth.
But the people at ground zero, African-Americans at home and Muslims abroad, don’t need videos to know the truth. The truth is that the American deployment of violence has gone badly off the rails. Violence is always described in carefully crafted official statements as discriminate or unavoidable; wrongful deaths as regrettable and unusual errors of judgement. The truth, though, is that violence is now often the first resort. Acting under cover of law, weaponized Americans have become a lawless force.