Category Archives: Viva!

B’Tselem: New footage shows Israeli soldiers shoot, beat Palestinian to death

PNN/ Jericho/

On the night of 22 February 2018, about 20 Israeli soldiers entered Jericho city as part of a raid and arrest campaign, where they entered a home and searched it while other soldiers waited at the entrance to the alley where the house was located.

The soldiers’ presence led to clashes in which Palestinians threw stones at the soldiers. At some point, Yassin a-Saradih (35) ran with an iron bar attached to a car wheel rim towards the soldiers who were standing at the entrance to the alley, in an attempt to attack them.

A report by B’Tselem on Wednesday published new footage by CCTV cameras of nearby shops, showing Israeli soldiers shoot and beat Saradih to death.

The video, collected by B’Tselem, shows the following:

“In video footage captured by security cameras of nearby stores, a-Saradih is seen running towards the soldiers with the bar. A soldier then shoots him in the lower body at point blank range. After the shooting, three other soldiers emerge from the alley and all four forcefully kick a-Saradih, who is lying on the ground. The soldiers are seen beating him with their rifles and dragging him into the alley. There, they continue to drag him along face down and then lean over him, shine flashlights on him, kick him lightly and move him with their feet. After about ten minutes, during which time they offer the wounded man no medical assistance, one of the soldiers fires a tear-gas cannister at the entrance to the alley. The soldiers are then seen dragging a-Saradih into the alley, out of the cameras’ range, apparently to avoid the tear gas that drifted their way.

“About fifteen minutes later, the soldiers are seen again outside the alley, this time carrying a-Saradih by his arms and legs. They hoist him onto a military jeep that drives up and he is driven away.

“The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit changed its version of the event several times. In its first response, the unit stated that a-Saradih had attacked the soldiers, armed with a knife, and had attempted to grab their weapons, and that during his arrest he had sustained an injury and received first aid. In a second announcement issued later that day, the unit stated only that he had tried to attack the force, which “responded with gunfire, confronted the terrorist from close range and managed to stop him”, and that a knife had later been found on a-Saradih’s body. The next day, the military claimed that he had apparently died from tear gas inhalation.

According to the autopsy results published that day by the media, a-Saradih was shot with live ammunition in the abdomen and may have died of blood loss. Nevertheless, the military continued to claim that the paramedics who treated him saw no sign of bullet entry.

“This is a particularly grave incident: The soldiers forcefully kicked a severely wounded man lying on the ground and beat him with their rifles in the head, upper body and groin,” B’Tselem said. “Then they dragged him along an alleyway as though he were not a human being and did not offer him crucial medical aid for more than thirty minutes.”

B’Tselem concluded by saying:

“In light of this unacceptable conduct, the attempts made by the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit to justify the incident with one excuse or another are equally disturbing – as is the resounding silence of military and civilian officials. The absence of a firm, unequivocal statement by the military that such conduct will not be tolerated effectively condones the soldiers’ actions, allowing such incidents to recur in the future. The announcement that a Military Police investigation has been launched, as reported by the media, is meant merely to create the illusion that the military is treating the incident with all seriousness. Based on years of experience, the investigation is unlikely to result in any indictment of the persons responsible for the killing and ill-treatment of a-Saradih – certainly not among the higher ranks.”

Links to full video footage:

 

Head of Nation’s Biggest Teachers’ Union Says Arming School Teachers is “Insane”

“Firearm skills degrade quickly,” wrote the NASRO, “which is why most law enforcement agencies require their officers to practice on a shooting range frequently (as often as once per month), under simulated, high-stress conditions. Anyone without such frequent, ongoing practice will likely have difficulty using a firearm safely and effectively.”

And then there was this point:

“Anyone who hasn’t received the extensive training provided to law enforcement officers will likely be mentally unprepared to take a life, especially the life of a student assailant.”

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump hosted another meeting pertaining to the frightening and tragic issue of school shootings, and what the nation ought to be doing to prevent them. The president has hosted a series of such meetings in the two weeks since the Feb. 14 killing of seventeen students and teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida.

At each meeting, POTUS has suggested a slightly different combination of possible policy changes, the most controversial and consistent being his notion of arming a significant percentage of school teachers with guns.

Also on Wednesday, Randi Weingarten the head of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), sent a polite but firmly-worded letter to President Trump to explain why his recent proposal to arm teachers, most of whom are members of her union, was….well…insane.

Actually, Ms. Weingarten, who has held the top position of the powerful 1.7 million member union since 2008, didn’t use the word “insane” in her letter. She did, however, use it on C-SPAN a few days earlier.

Instead, Weingarten told Mr.Trump what she’d heard when she held “a telephone town hall” about the matter in which 600,000 educators participated, and also what she said she’d learned in talking to hundreds of educators in Broward County after the school massacre in Parkland.

“The response we have heard,” she wrote, “is universal. Teachers don’t want to be armed. We want to teach. Our first instinct is to protect kids, not engage in a shootout that would place more children in danger.”

This don’t-arm-teachers message was most notably expressed, according to the union leader, “from educators who are gun owners, military veterans and National Rifle Association members.”

Trump’s call to arms for teachers, Weingarten also pointed out, brings up a host of logistical questions.

First of all, how exactly would this work? Would every classroom now need a gun closet? If so, “where would the key be stored?”

Most armed professionals are expected to regularly recertify for proficiency, she pointed out. So what what about teachers? And what kind of guns are we talking about, Weingarten asked. Would teachers get firearms “similar to the military-style AR-15 weapons” that so many school shooters seemed to favor?

What about funding? Who would provide the billions of dollars it would take to pay for guns, ammunition and training, “when so many schools currently lack nurses, guidance counselors, and school resource officers and have a multitude of other unmet needs?” Surely those needs should come first.

And in the seconds after an active shooter alert, “are teachers supposed to get their guns or get their students to safety?”

Last of all, she wanted to know if teachers would be “held liable for their actions and decisions?”

Weingarten is also an attorney.

As fate would have it, a few hours after Weingarten’s letter went off to the president and was forwarded to the press, the point of view that the majority of her union members seemed to share was scarily illustrated when a well-liked 53-year-old social studies teacher at Dalton High School in northwest Georgia, locked his classroom door, and proceeded to terrify students by firing a shot through his classroom window.

Although, according to Dalton police, the teacher, whose name is Jesse Randall Davidson, ultimately surrendered to officers peacefully, the incident was sobering.

It is also interesting to note that, like the majority of teachers, school resource officers are dead against the idea of arming educators. The National Association of School Resource Officers said as much in detail a week ago, with a press release that listed six very specific reasons why.

One of the reasons made the same point that Weingarten made about recertification:

“Firearm skills degrade quickly,” wrote the NASRO, “which is why most law enforcement agencies require their officers to practice on a shooting range frequently (as often as once per month), under simulated, high-stress conditions. Anyone without such frequent, ongoing practice will likely have difficulty using a firearm safely and effectively.”

And then there was this point:

“Anyone who hasn’t received the extensive training provided to law enforcement officers will likely be mentally unprepared to take a life, especially the life of a student assailant.”

One might hope that teachers and school cops would have the last word on this issue. Yet, this week, Florida’s Republican-controlled state House and Senate moved bills forward that would train teachers to carry guns in classrooms.

Lawmakers in Michigan, Alabama, and Tennessee have their own similar bills moving through the legislative process.

Interestingly, several of the Tennessee lawmakers who strongly favored the bill in question argued, without any apparent irony, that the proposed law to arm educators was particularly necessary because the state had not allocated funds to hire school resource officers.

Thursday Open Thread | It’s Crooks R Us With This Administration

A spokesperson for Mulvaney told Arnold that the decision to drop the case against Golden Valley, which CFPB staff had spent years building, was made by the agency’s staffers themselves. Staffers denied this wildly implausible defense, and Mulvaney’s spokesperson eventually retracted it.

Just ask yourself…

WHAT IF….

44 had just ONE of these people….

JUST ONE….

Yeah, you know the answer to that.

The Trump Administration Is a Golden Age for Corporate Crooks

By Jonathan Chait

The Republican Party’s main legislative achievement was to facilitate the direct transfer of hundreds of billions of dollars into the hands of business owners. (The proceeds of the Trump tax cuts are mainly going into stock buybacks, a simple windfall for owners of capital.) But a second, less visible channel is the Trump administration’s program of lax regulation. While the tax cuts spray money at business owners as a whole, weak enforcement of regulations confers a windfall targeted specifically at businesses that cheat their customers or break the law.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has brought dramatically fewer cases and lower penalties under Trump. From last February through September, the agency brought 15 cases and collected $127 million in civil penalties, in comparison with 43 cases and $702 million in penalties during a comparable period in 2016. Likewise, the Environmental Protection Agency is collecting far less in penalties from polluters than it did under any of the previous three administrations:

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created to fill in a bare spot in the federal regulatory design: financial products, which are inherently complex and in need of regulation, had been marketed to largely unwitting customers with a minimal amount of oversight, resulting in endemic fraud. Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s director of the CFPB, has called the agency itself a “sick, sad joke.” Just how his vision would translate into practice has already become apparent.

Chris Arnold reports for NPR that Mulvaney forced the agency to drop a lawsuit against alleged loan-shark outfit Golden Valley Lending. Arnold found a Golden Valley victim named Julie Bonenfant, from Detroit, who needed money after a breakup and having her car stolen led to falling behind on rent. Over the course of a year, Bonenfant paid $3,735 to Golden Valley for a $900 loan. “A key backer of Golden Valley was recently convicted of racketeering charges in a case involving another online lender, according to court documents,” reports Arnold.

A spokesperson for Mulvaney told Arnold that the decision to drop the case against Golden Valley, which CFPB staff had spent years building, was made by the agency’s staffers themselves. Staffers denied this wildly implausible defense, and Mulvaney’s spokesperson eventually retracted it.

The IDF spreads a lie and the Israeli press plays along

Facts show that Mohammed Tamimi was shot in the head by Israeli soldiers. But the facts were not enough for the Israeli army, or the journalists who tow the government line.

Mohammed Tamimi, 15, was shot in the head with a rubber-coated bullet by the Israeli army shortly before the video of Ahed and Nur was filmed. (Activestills/Oren Ziv)

Mohammed Tamimi, 15, was shot in the head with a rubber-coated bullet by the Israeli army shortly before the video of Ahed and Nur was filmed. (Activestills/Oren Ziv)

Let’s start with the facts. On December 15, 2017, 15-year-old Mohammed Tamimi sustained a severe head wound during a demonstration in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh.

Like most Fridays in Nabi Saleh, demonstrators headed toward the village’s spring, which Israeli settlers took over a number of years ago. The Israeli soldiers who came to suppress the protest that day did not make do with just protecting the spring or the nearby settlement of Halamish — instead they invaded the village and commandeered a home, from which they opened fire at young demonstrators who threw stones at them.

Mohammed Tamimi was inside his village at the time. An Israeli army rubber-coated metal bullet struck him in his head, and was hospitalized in serious condition. We know this because the hospital produced a detailed report of the medical procedure, a CT scan of his head showing the bullet lodged inside, a photo of the bullet after it was removed in surgery, and the first-hand testimonies of those who witnessed the incident, including Israeli activists Jonathan Pollak and Oded Yediya.

Pollak and Yediya spent the rest of that afternoon making phone calls attempting to secure the transfer of Mohammed, whose life was in danger, to an Israeli hospital. They failed. The surgery took place at a Palestinian hospital in Ramallah finished only at 4:30 a.m. Mohammed required several more rounds of surgery to fix the damage to his skull. Haaretz’s Amira Hass published a detailed report of the incident at the time.

We also know that an hour or so after the shooting, Mohammed’s cousin Ahed tried to expel soldiers from the courtyard of her family home — and the rest is history. We know that just hours after the video of her slapping the soldiers went viral, 17-year-old Ahed was pulled out of her bed and arrested by Israeli soldiers. She is still in prison.

Ahed Tamimi during the first hearing of her trial at the Ofer prison military court. February 13, 2018. (Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

Ahed Tamimi during the first hearing of her trial at the Ofer prison military court. February 13, 2018. (Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

In an overnight raid in Nabi Saleh on Monday Israeli soldiers arrested Mohammed and eight other Palestinian youths. He was interrogated by Israeli police — without a parent or lawyer present — and was released after a few hours.

Those are the facts. Here’s the spin.

According to Maj.-Gen. Yoav “Poli” Mordechai, the head of Israel’s military government charged with ruling over Palestinians in the West Bank, during his interrogation Mohammed Tamimi confessed that his head injury was the result of a bicycle accident — that his head hit the handlebars.

Family members and human rights organizations explain the “confession” as such: a wounded child, whose family members are in Israeli prisons, and who is suspected of throwing rocks, will say anything just to go home if he is being interrogated in the middle of the night without a parent or lawyer present.

Law enforcement officers and army major generals are not supposed to simply accept something a distressed child tells them under duress in interrogation. They should know that the army itself never denied Mohammed Tamimi was shot, and that the aforementioned evidence proves it.

Mordechai, whose job it is to oversee and rule over the day-to-day lives of millions of Palestinian civilians, instead smeared the entire Tamimi family, as well as the witnesses and the hospital staff.

Everyone is lying, he says, the boy fell from his bike.

Why? Because it serves the army’s and government’s agenda — to fight every village, family, and child who resists Israeli military rule in the occupied territories.

Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories Yoav Mordechai (photo: Yotam Ronen / Activestills.org)

Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories Yoav Mordechai (photo: Yotam Ronen / Activestills.org)

A battle of narratives

In the face of such lies, one might expect that the Israeli media would paint a more serious picture that, inevitably, exposes Mordechai’s lies.

But that’s not the world we live in, at least not if you’re a consumer of Hebrew-language news.

Ynet published a short news item that included only Mordechai’s claims, without presenting any facts to counter his narrative.

Ma’ariv‘s headline and sub-headline were dedicated solely to Mordechai. Only those who read to the end of the article will find a response by the Tamimi family or by their attorney Gaby Lasky or MK Dov Khenin (Joint List). The facts are nowhere to be found.

Israel Hayom confused its readers with their headline: “Rubber bullet? What really wounded Mohammed Tamimi.” At least the paper deigned to include a photo of the bullet that was removed from the teen’s head.

Left: The rubber-coated bullet that was removed from Mohammed Tamimi's head; Right: CT scan of Mohammed Tamimi's head. (Courtesy of Tamimi family)

Left: The rubber-coated bullet that was removed from Mohammed Tamimi’s head; Right: CT scan of the bullet inside Mohammed Tamimi’s head. (Courtesy of Tamimi family)

Channel 10 struck a near-identical tone with the headline, “A battle of versions.” There is no truth, of course. There’s no need to find out what actually happened. Dear viewers at home, you get to decide who is telling the truth: the IDF or the Palestinians.

And lastly, Haaretz. As expected, the paper did its due diligence — yet still fell into a similar trap. The initial Hebrew headline read: “IDF: Ahed Tamimi’s cousin admits he was not shot in the head but injured on his bicycle.” Anyone who read the headline would likely assume the army had exposed a lie. At first, the article only dealt with Mordechai’s post, as well as the responses to it. Within an hour or two the headline was changed to mention the CT scan, and the tone of the text focused on exposing Mordechai’s lie.

Aside from Haaretz, the coverage of the Mohammed Tamimi story reveals the sordid status of Israeli journalism. Statements by the army and the police are taken as truth, especially in the face of claims made by Palestinians. At best, we hear about a battle of conflicting narratives.

That is not journalism – it’s government propaganda.

This article was also published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read it here.

Chile student protest leaders send support to Florida gun campaigners

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Four leaders of 2011 movement send letter to young US activists urging them to fight idea that only adults should make the decisions

It began with a classroom walkout, grew into a nationwide protest movement led by high school and university students – and culminated in radical reforms previously dismissed as unthinkable.

Six years later, the Chilean student leaders who overthrew the country’s political establishment with street protests and legislative victories, have sent a message of support for the young Florida activists pushing for gun reform in the US.

Continue reading…

US immigration attacks Oakland mayor for warning of raid that arrested 150

Good mayor! ICE bad!

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Agency chief likens mayor to ‘gang lookout’ over early public alert that helped 800 avoid arrest

A day after agents confirmed that more than 150 people in California were arrested in immigration raids, a federal immigration official lashed out at the Oakland mayor who gave a public warning ahead of the raids, saying it was “no better than a gang lookout yelling ‘police’”.

The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) chief, Thomas Homan, speaking to Fox and Friends on Wednesday, said that the warning from the mayor, Libby Schaaf, helped about 800 people avoid arrest. He also said the justice department was looking into whether Schaaf obstructed justice.

Continue reading…

Costa Rica Studies Its Land, to Keep from Losing It

Donald Vásquez shows how the land has been degraded in an area of coffee plantations on the slopes of Berlin, one of the towns in the Barranca-Jesús María river basin in western Costa Rica. Farmers in the area, with the support of experts, have built terraces and channels to curb erosion. Credit: Miriett Ábrego / IPS

Donald Vásquez shows how the land has been degraded in an area of coffee plantations on the slopes of Berlin, one of the towns in the Barranca-Jesús María river basin in western Costa Rica. Farmers in the area, with the support of experts, have built terraces and channels to curb erosion. Credit: Miriett Ábrego / IPS

By Daniel Salazar
SAN JOSE , Feb 28 2018 (IPS)

Donald Vásquez points to the soil on a farm located in one of the most degraded basins on the Pacific Ocean side of Costa Rica. Below, where he points with his index finger, there is a huge layer of white earth, with dozens of bare coffee plants struggling to produce beans in the next harvest.

“This used to be a cloud forest, a rainforest 60 years ago. Now the soil looks like this. From a productive point of view, this has practically died,” Vàsquez, who is taking part in several initiatives aimed at restoring the soil in the Barranca River-Jesús María River basin, where land degradation is already impacting farmers, told IPS.

Vásquez lives in one of the towns in the basin, about 60 km from San José, to the west of the Costa Rican Central Valley, within an area at about 1,500 m above sea level dedicated mainly to coffee growing.“Here we lament it when a tropical forest is cut down, we know that’ a terrible thing. But a tropical forest can regenerate in 60, 80 years. When you lose the soil, recovering it can sometimes take up to 200 years.” – Óscar Lucke

His concern is not about something that is a minor issue in Central America. The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) estimated in its Global Land Outlook (GLO) report, published in 2017, that degraded lands account for over a fifth of forest and agricultural lands in Latin America and the Caribbean.

According to the Costa Rican Advisory Commission on Land Degradation (Cadeti), established by the government, and in which Vásquez takes part, degradation is already happening in more than a tenth of the territory of Costa Rica, making it more necessary than ever to meet the goal of achieving Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) by 2030.

The concept of LDN is defined as “a state whereby the amount and quality of land resources, necessary to support ecosystem functions and services and enhance food security, remains stable or increases within specified temporal and spatial scales and ecosystems.”

Costa Rica is one of the countries in the region that devotes the greatest effort to meeting that goal. There is a need for more indicators and budget, but those dedicated to the matter, such as Vásquez, are already working on several initiatives to prevent the loss of more land.

“Here we lament it when a tropical forest is cut down, we know that’ a terrible thing. But a tropical forest can regenerate in 60, 80 years. When you lose the soil, recovering it can sometimes take up to 200 years,” Óscar Lucke, a consultant on land degradation neutrality and a retired professor who is a representative of civil society in Cadeti, told IPS.

“We are working to protect that wealth of biodiversity and all the services we need that are in the soil,” he explained.

It was not until 2015 that the UNCCD agreed to set national goals to stabilise the planet’s soils. But in Costa Rica Cadeti was already working on the issue since 1998, through coordinated work among different government and academic bodies.

For this reason, this Central American country of 4.9 million people became one of the 10 pilot sites in the world to implement LDN, and the only one in Latin America.

In April 2017, the government reinforced the strategy with a decree that coordinates the different agencies involved in that objective and, in addition, designated Cadeti as the body within the Ministry of Environment and Energy to advise all public institutions in how to move towards that goal.

Assessing the land

Several indicators are used to measure neutrality in land use.

According to the 2017 Scientific Conceptual Framework for LDN, countries must observe the evolution of three key elements: forest cover, productivity and soil organic carbon. So far, Costa Rica only has information on the first indicator, and is working to obtain the others this year, with important progress made so far.

In fact, between 2000 and 2015, Costa Rica went from 47 percent to 54 percent of forest cover, while all other Central American countries have proportionally cut their forest covers, according to a study released in December by the State of the Nation of Costa Rica, an interdisciplinary body of experts.

The first State of the Environment Report, published Feb. 20, prepared by the Costa Rican government, notes that the country increased its forest area by 112,000 hectares between 2010 and 2013 (currently it has more than three million hectares of forest), an increase of almost the same amount as the reduction in crops and pastureland, which amounted to 114,000 hectares.

“That is very positive. In general, the more covered the soil is, the better, but protection guidelines have to be implemented in the areas that clearly cannot be covered with trees, because crops have to be planted to grow food,” said Carlos Henríquez, director of the University of Costa Rica’s Agricultural Research Centre, and an expert in soil fertility.

He told IPS it is necessary to implement protection practices to try to maintain the resource in a sustainable way, because the increase in forest cover does not mean that farmers always use their land well.

For example, the cultivation of pineapple (questioned because of its link with soil erosion and the high use of agrochemicals) has increased fivefold since 2000, according to the annual report of the State of the Nation.

For that reason, the government is working on generating carbon maps and productivity maps to identify the most degraded areas of the country.

According to forest engineer Adriana Aguilar, the national focal point for the UNCCD, and an official in the National System of Conservation Areas, an agreement is also being hammered out between the government and the German Technical Cooperation Agency (GIZ), aimed at identifying key actors and model projects, and capturing resources for them.

“That is a goal for this year, so that from 2019 we can report on that basis. By defining these indicators, applying the panel, finishing our action plan and implementing this decree, we are moving towards achieving that goal,” she told IPS.

There are already several initiatives to work with farmers in the areas that, according to estimates, could have the most degraded soils in the country.

“Degrading the land is very easy. To recover them is the difficult thing. Farmers do not have resources for this and there are crops, such as coffee, that already have very low productivity,” said Renato Jiménez, another member of Cadeti, which for the past six years has carried out more than a hundred projects on farms in the most degraded areas of the country.

For example, in the Barranca-Jesús María river basin, farmers and experts from the government and civil society have created channels and terraces to prevent water from washing away their crops and nutrients, and have extracted healthy bacteria from the forest to use in their plants.

For Vásquez, who operates in the area, that is key because with climate change the rains in Costa Rica seem to be increasing in intensity and decreasing in frequency.

“The idea is for river flows to not build up so much speed or destroy the soil so much. I believe that if people see the positive results, and notice that coffee production is increasing, other neighbours will copy it, because production here has been dropping,” he said.

The post Costa Rica Studies Its Land, to Keep from Losing It appeared first on Inter Press Service.