Author: admin

Ambassador Sabino Vaca Narvaja held meetings with BRICS Bank President Dilma Rousseff and Foreign Minister Qin Gang in Shanghai

Post Content

“If at least part of the judicial reform doesn’t pass by the end of the [Knesset’s] summer session – what am I doing in this job?”

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

MK Simcha Rothman (Religious Zionism), head of the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committe,e told 103FM Monday that the government will not survive without passing some form of judicial reform.

“This coalition, without [passing] the repair of the judicial system – not as a threat, and not as a deadline or an ultimatum… will not manage to exist,” he said. “It won’t be because someone flexed his muscles at someone else, but because it is a most essential promise [to the voters].”

Rothman was interviewed this week after Justice Minister Yariv Levin, his fellow architect of the reform that has hotly divided the nation, reportedly said that “if at least part of the judicial reform doesn’t pass by the end of the [Knesset’s] summer session – what am I doing in this job?”

It was not the first time Rothman had issued such a warning. In an interview with Ynet last month, he said the coalition could not last without the reforms. That statement was seen by many as a veiled threat that he would leave the government as a tactic to pressure Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into moving forward with the project.

“It’s not my personal project,” Rothman told 103FM. “It’s a coalition-wide project, of 64 mandates – and even more, because as you know today there is wide agreement among Opposition members and Opposition voters, that a reform of the judicial system is necessary. So I’m optimistic that it will happen and also pessimistic about the ability to hold together a coalition without it happening.”

Considering what he called its “unparalleled importance,” Rothman also said that while he “very much hoped” that the negotiations between government and Opposition representatives under the auspices of President Isaac Herzog on all aspects of the reform would bear fruit, “if they keep staying at the point of automatic rejection of every [proposal] and attempts to blow it up as we’ve seen in the last 24 hours, 48 hours, then we have to proceed by ourselves.”

“We all want to [have the reform] by agreement,” he said. “We have invested many hours of effort to it. But if the Opposition thinks it has veto power … that’s not going to happen.”

When the interviewer stated that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was no longer supportive, giving as an example that he had told the S&P credit rating agency that he had “stopped” the reform, Rothman firmly disagreed. Netanyahu was just saying that it would not be passed in its original form, which was true even now, he said, as changes were already made by his committee after one part of the reform passed its first reading in the Knesset.

He also suggested that the term “stopped” was used because the prime minister had frozen the process in order to negotiate with the Opposition. This was a political ploy he and his party had disagreed with, he noted, but if it brings about a reform acceptable to all, then “the State of Israel played it very well.”

What part of the reform to advance first if negotiations fail will be a matter of discussion between the party heads in the coalition, he said, while noting that on a technical level, the issue that is “most ready” is the revision of the Judicial Selection Committee.

This is also perhaps the most controversial element of the reform, as the bill as it currently stands would erase the veto that sitting justices have over the selection of their successors, with a majority of those on the committee becoming elected representatives of the public. The Opposition claims that this change would “destroy democracy” in Israel.

The post Can Netanyahu’s government last without judicial reform? appeared first on World Israel News.

A 9-year-old girl from Illinois, Kayla Unbehaun, was tragically abducted by her noncustodial mother, Heather Unbehaun, in July 2017. The pair went missing for three years until a miraculous reunion and an arrest by authorities on May 13, 2021.

The reunion came to life when an employee of Plato’s Closet in Asheville, North Carolina, recognized the mother-daughter duo from “well-publicized media” and contacted the police. Though the exact source of media is unknown, the kidnapping has been featured in Netflix’s “Unsolved Mysteries” episode dedicated to parental abduction last year, which could have provided the initial clues for the employee.

Authorities arrested 40-year-old Heather with a $225,000 bond and are now in the process of extraditing her to Illinois, where she will face a charge of child abduction from the Kane County State’s Attorney’s Office.

Meanwhile, Kayla, now 15 years old, will be in the full care of the North Carolina Department of Social Services. Kayla’s father, Ryan Iskerka, is justifiably overjoyed at her safe return and deeply appreciates the South Elgin Police Department, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, and all of the law enforcement agencies who have assisted with her case. Ryan also thanked the “Bring Kayla Home” Facebook page followers for helping keep her story alive and spreading awareness of the case.

The story of Kayla Unbehaun’s abduction and the groups that worked together to bring her home emphasizes the power of media and awareness in locating missing persons. It also serves as a reminder of the need for parental supervision to prevent abduction and exploitation. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children provides such resources for parents to help keep their children safe during such times.

On Tuesday, two homeschool parents in Georgia were charged with various counts of attempted homicide, child cruelty, battery, and false imprisonment after their 10-year-old son was discovered emaciated and wandering the streets. Spalding County District Attorney Marie Broder shared in a press conference that had the boy not been found; the outcome would have been much different.

Friday saw the boy, described as “very thin” with discolored skin, being treated for malnutrition and a low heart rate. Residents of Westminster Circle, who first noticed the child, took him in and made the emergency call. Severe malnutrition had caused the 10-year-old to weigh 36 pounds, far lower than the healthy average for his age in the United States.

Tyler Schindley and Krista Schindley each face charges of attempted homicide and malice murder as well as cruelty to children in the first, second, and third degree, battery, simple battery, and false imprisonment. The warrants detailed that the couple inflicted “cruel and excessive physical and mental pain” on their son by withholding food for an extended period and preventing medical attention. The Schindleys allegedly have gone so far as to lock the child in his bedroom on multiple occasions, denying him any access to food, clothing, lights, or adult contact.

The abuse of the boy occurred for at least three years, starting from May 12, 2020. The father presented himself to the police soon after the child was found, and the mother was arrested following an interview. The other kids were immediately taken into Georgia’s Department of Family and Children’s Services custody so they might remain safe.

At this time, law enforcement is still trying to uncover what caused this horrific runaway of events. Broder clarified that none of the siblings had undergone “forensic” interviews, nor had the victim, leaving motives a mystery. Both spouses made their initial court appearance Monday, and a bond hearing is forthcoming in the following weeks.

“Bold Goals”: Biden’s Executive Order Will Have Us Bioengineering Everything

By Marie Hawthorne, May 15, 2023

In September 2022, President Biden released an Executive Order on Advancing Biotechnology. Then, In March 2023, he released a document entitled Bold Goals …

The post Selected Articles: “Bold Goals”: Biden’s Executive Order Will Have Us Bioengineering Everything appeared first on Global Research.

Image: President Harry Truman

First published by GR on September 7, 2014, minor edits. 

The Declassified documents were first posted by Global Research in December 2003

see my 2003 article on the Truman Doctrine

http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CRG312A.html

 

.

Author’s Introductory

…

The post America’s Blueprint for Global Domination: From “Containment” to “Pre-emptive War”. The 1948 Truman Doctrine appeared first on Global Research.

Philadelphia voters head to the polls today. All eyes are on progressive mayoral challenger Helen Gym. But longtime union organizer Seth Anderson-Oberman is also part of a suite of left-wing challengers on the city council.

Seth Anderson-Oberman, second from left, canvassing with SEIU supporters, April 27, 2023. (Seth Anderson Oberman for City Council District 8 / Twitter)

In the wake of the George Floyd uprisings across the country, Seth Anderson-Oberman saw the need to bring workers, particularly black workers, into the fight against racism. By founding and organizing with the Philadelphia Labor for Black Lives Coalition, which takes a worker-centered approach to eradicating racism, Anderson-Oberman distinguishes himself from a more liberal approach that embraces individual access to power and symbolic gestures of representation.

The coalition now includes sixteen unions, Anderson-Oberman told me, and “is fighting for the needs of black workers, not only by calling for an end to police violence, but also by supporting black families facing evictions, for example.”

Anderson-Oberman is campaigning on that ethos to represent his hometown in Northwest Philadelphia on City Council. Born and raised in Germantown, one of several neighborhoods in Philly’s Eighth Council District, he has spent the past two decades in the labor movement as a staff organizer with several different unions, including the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union, the American Federation of Teachers, and the Philadelphia Labor Council, AFL-CIO.

Like most cities across the country, Philadelphia has suffered from a lack of decent and affordable housing, struggled with gun violence and crime, and endured attacks on its public education system in recent decades. But the grip of austerity might be loosening as the city’s labor-left movement pushes back — an effort that Anderson-Oberman’s campaign is a part of.

Since the turn of the century, when community activists including current mayoral candidate Helen Gym were fighting the attempted privatization of public schools, Philadelphia has seen significant working-class organizing. Twelve years later, members of the union UNITE HERE went on hunger strike to protest school closures and jobs cuts; in 2016, newly organized nurses with the union PASNAP nearly shut down the Democratic National Convention before forcing their boss to the table to recognize their union and negotiate a contract; and after a failed campaign six years earlier, last month, graduate student workers at the University of Pennsylvania announced that they are unionizing.

A new cadre of progressive politicians and militant union leaders sympathetic to and born of these struggles have swept into office, including Kendra Brooks on City Council and Richard Hooker, head of Teamsters Local 623. Anderson-Oberman hopes to join them.

He grew up on the poorer end of a working-class, majority-black neighborhood, where his parents played in a Motown-inspired band and worked odd jobs to pay the bills. Eventually his stepfather, Hank Sanel, got a union job as a janitor represented by the SEIU Local 1199; he took advantage of its scholarship program and began taking night classes at Temple University. In 1984, the family moved to Schenectady, New York, where Sanel pursued a medical degree.

Just a decade prior to the family’s relocation, Schenectady was a thriving company town run by General Electric (GE), with tens of thousands of residents employed by the company. By the time Oberman-Anderson returned to Philadelphia in 1989 to work as a house painter and take classes at Temple, GE only employed some five thousand workers. He credits witnessing the devastation deindustrialization wrought on Schenectady — and specifically the realization that race alone does not determine poverty — as an early influence on his politics.

“I grew up in a poor, black neighborhood. That was what I knew, until I moved to Upstate New York, and saw GE job cuts give way to financial ruin that upended all workers’ lives, no matter their race,” he told me.

As a young adult at Temple, which Oberman-Anderson says he attended for the better part of that decade, he studied without any particular focus, taking classes in film, anthropology, African-American studies, women’s studies, and sociology. “I just wanted to learn about the world,” he recalls. Taking stock of the political climate, from the onset of the Gulf War to the 1992 Rodney King beating, he grew distraught.

Around the same time, community organizers fighting for a police civilian review board knocked on Anderson-Oberman’s door to discuss bringing the Philadelphia Police Department under more democratic supervision. The next week, he was out canvassing with them.

“I was outraged by what I saw,” says Anderson-Oberman, who also recalls growing up under Philadelphia’s notoriously corrupt 39th Police District.”

After college, Anderson-Oberman turned his attention toward the labor movement, where he has spent the entirety of this century. Most recently, he organized public and private sector health care workers with SEIU Healthcare Pennsylvania.

District Eight incumbent Cindy Bass has held the seat for more than a decade without facing any substantial electoral challenge. Bass champions herself as a beacon of experience and accomplishment, while casting her opponent as an inexperienced radical. In their recent debate Bass questioned Anderson-Oberman’s activist credentials and presence in the community. He responded, “I was born on a picket line.”

In the same debate, Anderson-Oberman also spoke about his past ties to the Communist Party and Young Communist League. Rather than shrink away from the red-baiting, he responded to a question about those ties by saying he is unashamed of his history.

“I joined the Young Communist League at [the] early age [of] twenty-one. . . . I haven’t been to a party meeting in fifteen years, but I’m very proud of that history. . . . The communists in this country led the fight against lynching, for unemployment insurance, social security. There’s a proud history of that in this country.”

Glad to have the opportunity to address this Q directly.

Now, let’s get to work to deliver a win for the people of Philly’s 8th district on May 16th. We have 19 days left. Donate, volunteer, VOTE. pic.twitter.com/Rs5TgbacvX

— Seth Anderson Oberman for City Council District 8 (@Seth4ThePeople) April 27, 2023

Bass has found an ally in right-wing billionaire Jeffrey Yass, much like other candidates in the city facing progressive challengers. Yass has bankrolled various conservative causes, from opposing abortion rights to supporting charters. Yass’s super PAC Philly for Growth spent $90,260 on television and digital advertising to support the councilwoman in the two weeks leading up to the election.

Yass has worsened Philadelphia’s crisis in public education. Chronic underinvestment coupled with the proliferation of charter schools — one of Yass’s primary interests — has led to overcrowded classrooms, a lack of counselors and nurses, and a dearth of extracurricular activities. But it also wears on the fabric of a community, according to public school teacher and Philadelphia Federation of Teachers member Dan Reyes:

When you walk past a shuttered public school — absent of chattering kids and young athletes, with graffiti and broken windows in their place — it’s like a missing tooth. Every time I drive by that high school it feels bad. It reminds you that something was taken from the neighborhood, something that should be there. It evokes strong feelings of neglect and disrespect. As a parent, that’s the last thing you want to see in the neighborhood that your kid is growing up in.

Most notably, Germantown High School was closed ten years ago — one of twenty-three public schools in Philadelphia shut down that year by the city’s School Reform Commission (SRC), which Anderson-Oberman says “was established by the state to take over Philadelphia schools and privatize them.” (Interestingly, the SRC was briefly overseen by Paul Vallas, who was recently defeated in Chicago’s mayoral race by Chicago Teachers Union organizer Brandon Johnson.) Ten years since the school property was sold to a developer group, it remains unused.

Anderson-Oberman is also running on instituting rent control in the city and increased funding for public housing, which Councilwoman Bass says would hurt landlords and development.

The Philadelphia City Council’s approach to zoning is centered around “councilmanic prerogative,” which affords councilmembers unilateral power to change the codes within their district. In recent years, this has often been used to pave the way for lucrative development deals, according to Anderson-Oberman’s finance director Nathan Holt.

Reyes, who has organized neighborhood canvases with his wife out of their home, believes that “the power around land use needs to serve the people, not the rich.” He says that Anderson-Oberman understands that “it’s going to require immense organizing of the constituents. Just him being in office won’t win change, and he gets that.”

Seth is the product of the community he grew up in as well as the movement he matured in. “I couldn’t be doing this today with the success that we’re having without the infrastructure that’s been built by left-labor groups throughout the city,” says Anderson-Oberman. He is endorsed by several unions and community groups, which he credits as “a powerful and growing movement that is challenging the stranglehold that the Democratic Party machine has had on our political system.”

Anderson-Oberman is endorsed by the Philadelphia chapter of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

Philly DSA electoral cochair Rachie Weisberg said that after the chapter’s independent expenditure campaign for Bernie Sanders in 2020, it shifted its focus toward local elections — most notably with public school teacher (and Jacobin contributing editor) Paul Prescod’s campaign for Pennsylvania State Senate. This cycle, Philly DSA has expanded its operation, endorsing three other city council candidates, Amanda McIllmurray and Andrés Celin, and David McMahon, who is running in Norristown just north of Philadelphia. Weisberg reminded me that while part of the point of electoral politics is to win — indeed, you can’t build a movement that only ever loses — a win is not defined solely by the ballot box.

“No one thinks electoral politics alone will save us,” Weisberg tells me. “But it offers a great way to meet people where they are at and bring them into all of the work our chapter does.” Anderson-Oberman is sober about this as well, saying:

We’ve done a better job than many campaigns in terms of having organized conversations in the community and engaging people at a grassroots level. I think our campaign has helped toward shifting the priorities in our city and our district towards the needs of working-class communities, especially black and brown working-class communities, who have experienced the brunt of divestment, displacement, and environmental racism for hundreds of years.

Today’s election will be a good test to gauge the strength of where Philadelphia’s progressive movement is at. The political composition of Philadelphia would look dramatically different if the four DSA-endorsed City Council candidates, as well as progressive mayoral challenger Gym, win. They would also join a growing leftist presence in Pennsylvania, with the likes of Nikil Saval, Rick Krajewski, and Elizabeth Fiedler, among others.

“I’ve been doing electoral organizing for five years in Philly and seen demonstrable growth,” says Weisberg. “The city is failing people, and they want change.”

Normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel is ‘hugely important, U.S. working to obtain it,’ Thomas Nides tells i24NEWS.

The post WATCH – Biden envoy Nides: Trump embassy move was ‘absolutely’ the right move appeared first on World Israel News.

“The Tel Aviv Museum of Art has a duty not to give Christie’s a platform to re-traumatize and insult Holocaust survivors.”

By Shiryn Ghermezian, Algemeiner

A coalition of Holocaust survivors in the U.S. has asked Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai to cancel the Tel Aviv Museum of Art’s participation in a series of events about the restitution of Nazi-looted art organized by Christie’s after the auction house recently hosted a controversial sale of Nazi-era jewelry.

David Schaecter, president of the Holocaust Survivors Foundation USA (HSF-USA), wrote a letter to Huldai on Sunday, two days after Christie’s completed its two-part auction of a 700-piece jewelry collection owned by Austrian billionaire and philanthropist Heidi Horten. Her first husband, the late Nazi party member Helmut Horten, built his retail empire in the 1930s by purchasing Jewish businesses “sold under duress” and for a fraction of their worth during the Nazi occupation of Germany. When he died, he left “a significant inheritance to Mrs. Horten,” according to Christie’s.

“The Tel Aviv Museum of Art must not support Christie’s hypocrisy,” wrote Schaecter, who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp and is one of the founders of the Holocaust Memorial in Florida, in the letter obtained by The Algemeiner. “At the same time Christie’s attempts to justify its gaudy sale of the Horten jewelry, it purports to be a champion of restitution to ‘send a clear message to those who participate in the illicit trade in cultural property.’ Please.”

Schaecter added: “Unless Christie’s and the Horten Estate change their position entirely and pledge every dollar from the auction for (1) restitution to the heirs of the families whose properties Horten acquired, and (2) full funding for the medical, financial, and long-term care needs of indigent survivors worldwide, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art has a duty not to give Christie’s a platform to re-traumatize and insult Holocaust survivors, our families, truth, and history.”

Christie’s Restitution department announced in January that in honor of the 25th anniversary of the Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, it will host a series of global events and initiatives throughout 2023 called “Reflecting on Restitution,” including at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in the late winter.

Before Christie’s began its auction of Heidi Horten’s jewelry collection last week, HSF-USA asked Christie’s to call off the auction, saying it was “perpetuating a disgraceful pattern of whitewashing Holocaust profiteers, justifying commerce and ‘charity.’” The foundation further said the actions of Christie’s and the Horten Foundation are “patently offensive and trivialize the Holocaust.”

Other Jewish groups also expressed their concerns about the auction and urged Christie’s to cancel the sale, but the auction house ignored the outcry.

“Christie’s is perpetuating one of the most terrible tactics of Holocaust collaborators and profiteers, who obscure the full scope of their greed by minimizing the murderous behavior that led to their fortunes,” Schaecter wrote in his letter to Huldai. He added that Christie’s vow to donate all proceeds from the auction to support philanthropic causes, and Holocaust education and research “is equally insulting.”

“The money, and those decisions, belong to the victims’ families, period,” he explained. “We survivors have seen this infuriating charade too often.”

The post Holocaust survivors urge Tel Aviv mayor to pull out of Christie’s events after auction house sells jewellery with Nazi ties appeared first on World Israel News.