Thursday 31 May 2018

Bad day for world trade: Brussels vows to retaliate against US tariffs in coming hours


Bad day for world trade: Brussels vows to retaliate against US tariffs in coming hours
The EU will introduce swift counter-balancing measures to steel and aluminum tariffs imposed by the US, according to the President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker.
“This is a bad day for world trade. So, we will immediately introduce a settlement dispute with the WTO and will announce counter-balancing measures in the coming hours,” Juncker said in a speech in Brussels. “It is totally unacceptable that a country is imposing unilateral measures when it comes to world trade.”
The response followed Washington’s decision on Thursday to impose a 25 percent tariff on steel imports and a 10 percent tariff on aluminum imports from the EU, Canada and Mexico. The countries had been granted a temporary exemption from the tariffs introduced by the White House on March 1. The metal tariffs will come into force at midnight (04:00 GMT) on Friday.
Justifying US steel tariffs based on national security concerns is “grotesque”, according to Germany’s steel industry association.
The US measures are a protectionist intervention in international trade and run counter to the principles of the World Trade Organization,” the body said in a statement, сalling for a swift WTO decision on challenges to the tariffs.
Canadian authorities said they would take retaliatory steps, responding to the US metal tariffs, according to government sources, as quoted by Canadian TV channel Global News.
Canada has already mulled over several counter measures with the decision expected to be made after consultation with relevant ministries and heads of the regions, the channel reported Thursday.
US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said that no reprisals over the measure will have an impact on the American economy. The official said he believes there will not be a long-term impact on relations with affected countries and they “will get over this in due course.”
President Trump said the US had been unfairly treated in trade with its neighboring and oversees partners. The US President has threatened to respond to any new EU trade barriers with a tax on cars produced by European automakers.

Court finds Lithuania & Romania in breach of torture ban while hosting CIA black sites


Court finds Lithuania & Romania in breach of torture ban while hosting CIA black sites
Lithuania and Romania, which hosted secret CIA prisons for terrorist suspects, are responsible for knowingly allowing the torture of prisoners, a European court ruled. It comes after the appointment of Gina Haspel as CIA head.
The two European nations, which hosted clandestine CIA detention facilities after 9/11, have breached basic tenets of the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights by allowing torture of prisoners to happen on their territory, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg ruled on Thursday.
The ECHR ruling refers to the cases of Saudi-born Abu Zabaydah and Saudi Abd Al Rahim Husseyn Muhammad Al Nashiri, both of whom are currently held at the US Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.
Zabaydah, a suspected senior Al-Qaeda member, was held for two months in Lithuania in 2005. Al Nashiri, who is suspected of organizing the attack on the USS Cole, was held in Romania between 2004 and 2005. The case was brought before the court by lawyers, who lodged complaints against the European nations in 2011 and 2012.
In a unanimous vote, seven European judges said Romania and Lithuania violated the ban on torture and failed to protect the two prisoners’ rights to liberty, security and effective legal remedy. Romania also failed to seek US assurances that Al Nashiri would not be sentenced to the death penalty, which is outlawed in Europe, before handing him over to American custody. The two governments will have to pay €100,000 ($117,000) to each man, the court decided. Lithuania and Romania have three months to file an appeal, should they wish to contest the ruling.
In 2014, Zabaydah received a similar ruling by the ECHR in a case against Poland, where he was held at a CIA black site between 2002 and 2003.
The new European ruling comes less than a month after the controversial confirmation of Haspel as the new head of the CIA. Critics call her ‘Torture Queen’ and ‘Bloody Gina’ for the role she played in the US program of torturing terrorist suspects. She also reportedly played a key part in the 2005 destruction of videotapes of the interrogations involving torture by the CIA. Those include the abuses of Al Nashiri and Zabaydah.
During her confirmation hearing in the US Congress, Haspel said she pledged that there will be no more torture under her watch, apparently winning over lawmakers, who intended to block her nomination over her past. Her detractors claim she personally took part in interrogations because she liked seeing prisoners being hurt.
Terrorist suspects were subjected to various forms of what the Bush administration preferred to call ‘enhanced interrogation,’ including waterboarding, sensory and sleep deprivation, being forced to remain in stress positions, confinement in extremely small spaces and various forms of intimidation. The program was stopped by the Obama administration, but he failed to prosecute anyone involved in it. The incumbent president, Donald Trump, expressed support for the approach on several occasions and promised to lock up more terrorists in Guantanamo Bay.

Someone tell Boris that Babchenko’s alive! Putin critics are catnip for Britain’s Foreign Secretary


Someone tell Boris that Babchenko’s alive!  Putin critics are catnip for Britain’s Foreign Secretary
24 hours after it was revealed that rumors of the death of Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko had been greatly exaggerated, someone still needs to tell UK’s Boris Johnson, if his Twitter feed is anything to go by.
The top tweet on BoJo’s twitter feed, a day after Babchenko reappeared like Lazarus, still says that he is “appalled” about the murder - that didn’t happen, and that “We must defend freedom of speech and it is vital that those responsible are now held to account.”
We’ll be waiting a long time for a follow up tweet in which Johnson says how appalled he is that he was misled by the intelligence service of an ally, although perhaps he’s now immune to embarrassment and won’t let it bother him. With Johnson in charge, I expect the rest of the Foreign Office would be in favor of some minor curbs on free speech.
The Foreign Office has recently been caught deleting tweets that made misleading claims about Russia over the Salisbury spy poisoning, so Johnson can’t be expected to delete the tweet insinuating Russian guilt for a fake murder, but couldn’t he at least express how glad he is to hear that the journalist, he was so moved to write about, is alive? Or at least just let the world know he’s seen the news?
At this point it’s not entirely clear what happened with the very much alive Babchenko, with much of the global media now a little hesitant about taking the Ukrainians on their word.
There are question marks over the veracity of the evidence that the Ukrainian intelligence services believe they have against Russia over an alleged plan to kill the Russian journalist, but current British government policy appears to be that there is no excuse to pass up the chance to have a good old dig at Russia, even when the facts change.

It would be unkind to suggest that Boris is not fully devoted to the safety of free speech and journalists in Ukraine, but it is probably fair to speculate that the description of Babchenko as a “murdered Putin critic” was what really got him scrabbling online. The revelation of an ‘alive Putin critic’ hasn’t so far been deemed tweetable by Boris.
Further analysis of Johnson’s twitter feed shows three of his last five tweets have been aimed at Russia, the other two were about saving elephants. The sixth and seventh tweets are about dementia and recycling, but the reader can insert their own joke there.
Setting yourself up as a ‘Putin critic’ is like a flare gun in a dark room for anyone wanting to attract the attention of Western politicians now. Just below Johnson’s tweet about Babchenko, we see that the Foreign Secretary had recently come off the phone with self-styled “Putin enemy number one” Bill Browder who had just been released from custody over in Spain after Moscow had requested his arrest on charges of fraud.
The Foreign Secretary was on the phone to Browder so fast, any Brit who finds themselves in a sticky situation abroad and in need of Foreign Office assistance would be well advised to put ‘Putin critic’ down as their occupation on the arrest forms.
When Russia is a target, a country like Ukraine, which will see some advantage to undermining Moscow, can play on the fault lines being caused by what the Kremlin claims is a concerted campaign against it. In other words you can pretend to kill someone who has the reputation of being a Putin critic, and be safe in the knowledge that not even senior international figures will ask any hard questions about what actually happened.
The Babchenko incident shows that the British government remains quick to accuse Russia where it is expedient, but has so far not found a way to dial back the criticism when the facts come in.

Watch | Max Blumenthal Grills OAS Panel on Venezuela’s “Crimes Against Humanity”


An OAS panel featured condemnations of Venezuela’s human rights violations by one of the world’s most prominent defenders of Israeli atrocities.

n May 29, a panel of self-described independent experts convened a press conference at the Organization of American States in Washington DC. The panel presented a 400-page report accusing the Venezuelan government of crimes against humanity and demanding the prosecution of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro at the International Criminal Court.
The panel comprised a collection of aggressive advocates of regime change in Venezuela. I attended the event to question the self-proclaimed experts on their ulterior agenda and the absurd contradictions behind their claims to support universal human rights.
“With right-wing allies ruling Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and Peru, the OAS has faded back into its history as an instrument of US domination of Latin America,” Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told the Grayzone Project.
Weisbrot added OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro, “is obsessed with Venezuela, and determined to do whatever he can to achieve regime change there, by any means necessary.”
According to Weisbrot, “Almagro has been campaigning to topple the government of Venezuela for years now, he supports the illegal financial embargo against Venezuela — which actually violates the OAS charter itself, among other international treaties and conventions. But he even goes a step further, proposing an embargo on Venezuela’s oil exports, which shows his complete indifference to the suffering of Venezuelans, or their deaths from shortages of medicines.”
Joining Almagro on the panel was Santiago Canton, an Argentinian lawyer who has leveraged his position in various international bodies to push regime change in Venezuela. In 2002, after a right-wing putsch briefly removed Hugo Chavez from power, Canton delivered a letter to the coup leaders on behalf of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights addressing the dictatorship as a legitimate government.
Canton previously led the Latin America Program of the National Democratic Institute (NDI), an arm of the US-backed National Endowment for Democracy, which has contributed large sums of money to pro-opposition organizations and parties in Venezuela. The NDI’s sister group, the International Republican Institute, vocally backed the 2002 coup against Hugo Chavez. (At the time, the IRI was chaired by Sen. John McCain).
In introducing the OAS panel on Venezuela, Almagro declared that his organization was a “moral force” with a special mandate to mete out justice against Caracas.
Rounding out the panel was Irwin Cotler, a former Canadian parliamentarian and veteran Israel lobbyist who recently blamed Palestinians for Israel’s killing of 62 protesters in one day in the Gaza Strip. Like a Canadian version of Alan Dershowitz, Cotler reflexively rushes out in Israel’s defense whenever it is accused of committing atrocities against Palestinians.
Cotler has also served as a legal advocate for Leopoldo Lopez, the imprisoned right-wing coup leader and orchestrator of Venezuela’s violent guarimbas. Sparing no opportunity for hyperbole, he used his time on the panel to accuse Venezuela’s government of carrying out the worst humanitarian crisis in the history of Latin America.
In the video below, you can watch me question the panelists about their claims of independence and moral consistency:

Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of books including best-selling Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the PartyGoliath: Life and Loathing in Greater IsraelThe Fifty One Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza, and The Management of Savagery, which will be published later this year by Verso. He has also produced numerous print articles for an array of publications, many video reports and several documentaries including Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie and the forthcoming Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded the Grayzone Project in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.
Stories published in our Daily Digests section are chosen based on the interest of our readers. They are republished from a number of sources, and are not produced by MintPress News. The views expressed in these articles are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MintPress News editorial policy.
https://www.mintpressnews.com/max-blumenthal-grills-oas-panel-on-venezuelas-crimes-against-humanity/243023/

Israel’s “One of a Kind” New Apartheid Wall to Choke Gaza: A Triple-Layered Sea Barrier


Unimpeded by an international community that remains largely silent over Israeli crimes, Tel Aviv has subjected the people of Gaza to numerous novel and experimental tools of repression and weapons delivery systems, including new unmanned systems and militarized methods of spatial control.


TEL AVIV, ISRAEL — Whatever one’s opinion may be about the ongoing Israeli dispossession of the people of Palestine and the crippling siege of the Gaza Strip, one can’t fault Tel Aviv for lacking originality.
Such unique means of choking off the Palestinians’ ability to live as normal human beings will be on full display with a new $833 million sea barrier being erected: it will include a submarine barrier, a stone wall, and a layer of barbed wire that will be surrounded by an additional fence.
Hardline Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman described the barrier as a “one of a kind in the world” measure that protects the occupation “with power and sophistication” and prevents the people of Gaza from entering Israeli-controlled territory by sea.
TRANSLATION | Today we began building a sea barrier one of kind in the world will block any possibility of entering Israel by sea. This further prevents Hamas, which is now losing another strategic asset after investing huge sums in its development. Will keep protecting Israel’s citizens with power and sophistication.
The construction of the novel “sea wall” was ordered during the Israeli military onslaught “Operation Protective Edge” of 2014, when Hamas resistance fighters penetrated the Israeli border by sea before being killed by occupation forces.
The barrier will be accompanied by the enhancement of the border fence sealing off the besieged coastal strip, including a massive underground barrier.

The ongoing deprivation of Gaza’s sea access

While the 1993 Oslo Accord permits Palestinians in Gaza to take part in fishing within the maritime corridor, which extends 20 miles from the coast, the Israelis began ignoring the agreement in 2000 and have typically limited vessels to a maximum of three to six miles – a blatant breach of the landmark agreement Tel Aviv signed with the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Gazan fishermen venturing offshore generally risk death or injury for attempting to ply their trade, as generations of Palestinians have done before them, and are usually greeted by warning shots by Israeli naval forces or are simply fired upon.  Egypt has also restricted the activities of fishermen from Gaza.
On Tuesday, a Palestinian vessel carrying 17 students, patients, and wounded victims from the recent mass protests at the Gaza border was detained as it attempted to break the Israeli-imposed siege. The boat was transferred to the port of Ashdod, and had been accompanied by smaller vessels from Gaza before Israeli troops began opening fire on the seaborne assembly. The protest action came before the eighth anniversary of the deadly Israeli raid on the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish-flagged ship that had attempted to enter Gaza by sea to deliver aid in defiance of the Israeli blockade.

The occupation’s torment of Gaza

Following a failed 2007 coup attempt, backed by the Israelis and U.S., against the elected Hamas government, nearly 2 million Palestinians in Gaza have faced three devastating Israeli-initiated wars and a suffocating blockade.
Unimpeded by an international community that remains largely silent over Israeli crimes, Tel Aviv has also subjected the people of Gaza to numerous novel and experimental tools of repression and weapons delivery systems, including new unmanned systems and militarized methods of spatial control.
As Palestinian-American historian and former adviser to PLO negotiators Rashid Khalidi explained in 2014:
Israel has besieged, tormented, and regularly attacked the Gaza Strip. The pretexts change: they elected Hamas; they refused to be docile; they refused to recognize Israel; they fired rockets; they built tunnels to circumvent the siege; and on and on.
But each pretext is a red herring, because the truth of ghettos — what happens when you imprison 1.8 million people in a hundred and forty square miles, about a third of the area of New York City, with no control of borders, almost no access to the sea for fishermen, no real way in or out, and with drones buzzing overhead night and day — is that, eventually, the ghetto will fight back. It was true in Soweto and Belfast, and it is true in Gaza.”

Elliott Gabriel is a former staff writer for teleSUR English and a MintPress News contributor based in Quito, Ecuador. He has taken extensive part in advocacy and organizing in the pro-labor, migrant justice and police accountability movements of Southern California and the state’s Central Coast.
Stories published in our Daily Digests section are chosen based on the interest of our readers. They are republished from a number of sources, and are not produced by MintPress News. The views expressed in these articles are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MintPress News editorial policy.
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https://www.mintpressnews.com/israel-is-building-a-one-of-a-kind-new-apartheid-wall-to-choke-gaza/243091/