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By Quds News Network

In the early hours of April 17, four children were killed in a drone strike in central Gaza. Their burned and shredded bodies arrived at Shuhada’a Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah. According to eyewitnesses, they had been playing near tents set up for displaced families when an Israeli drone hovered overhead. Moments later, it exploded.

These aren’t ordinary drones. They’re designed to kill, not scout or surveil, but to identify human gatherings and detonate mid-air. These are suicide drones, or what Israel calls “loitering munitions.” Their use in Gaza marks a chilling evolution in the occupation’s warfare: impersonal, cost-effective, and lethal with minimal accountability.

Rotem L: A Weapon Built for Urban Mass Killings

In 2018, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) tested its “Rotem L” suicide drone in southern occupied Palestine. Built for dense urban environments like Gaza, this drone was developed specifically to target gatherings of people. It is small, fast, and deadly—designed to be operated by a single soldier. The entire system can be deployed in under a minute.

Carrying a warhead of 6.5 kilograms, the Rotem L drone flies silently for up to 45 minutes, seeking its target. Once locked, it crashes directly into human beings. It’s a flying bomb with AI-powered guidance and minimal oversight. It can be “recalled” or “re-routed,” giving Israeli operators plausible deniability when children are killed, yet often, it is not.

IAI didn’t stop with Rotem L. It also developed Harop—a kamikaze drone that blends the precision of a missile with the stealth of a drone—and the Green Dragon, a tactical loitering munition meant for small infantry units. These systems boast silent motors, long flight times, and precise targeting capabilities. But in Gaza, “precision” often translates into “plausible deniability” for war crimes.

A Drone for Every Soldier, A Death for Every Tent

What makes suicide drones especially dangerous is their convenience. They remove the need for pilots. Any soldier, with a few hours of training, can launch, steer, and kill. No chain of command, no delay, no cockpit hesitation. In Gaza, that translates to spontaneous attacks on gatherings, including refugee camps, aid queues, and family tents.

Israel claims its drones can distinguish faces. If that were true, then the decision to strike gatherings of displaced civilians becomes even more sinister. These drones are not “mistaken.” They are deliberate. Their victims are not “collateral damage.” They are targeted.

Since October 2023, suicide drones have increasingly buzzed over Gaza’s skies. Sometimes they watch, sometimes they kill. Their constant presence creates psychological terror. Fighters and civilians alike know they can turn deadly in an instant. No warning. No escape.

A War Crime Disguised as Innovation

International humanitarian law prohibits attacks that fail to distinguish between civilians and combatants. Suicide drones, by their very design, challenge this legal principle. They rely on sensors and algorithms to decide when to strike. But no sensor can measure innocence. No AI can differentiate between a child and a fighter when both are huddled under plastic sheets.

Legal scholars warn of growing accountability gaps: suicide drone strikes often occur without public oversight, clear chain of command, or external review. Civilian deaths are brushed off as “technical errors.” Investigations are rare, and when they do occur, they are internal and classified.

Israel’s deployment of suicide drones over displacement camps highlights how technology is being weaponized to obscure war crimes. With no cockpit footage to leak, no pilot testimony, and no accountability trail, drone warfare offers Israel a way to kill anonymously—and repeatedly.

Cheap, Lethal, and Exportable

Another reason for Israel’s increasing use of suicide drones is economic. Unlike jets and missiles that require imported components, drones like Rotem L are made in-house. They’re cheap to produce and can be launched in large numbers. Some drones can even be carried in a backpack, allowing entire infantry squads to field their own airstrikes.

International arms watchdogs have already criticized Israel’s drone exports. Several countries have canceled or reconsidered arms deals after seeing how these drones are used in Gaza. But instead of curbing production, Israel has doubled down, framing the use of suicide drones as “precision warfare.”

The results, however, speak for themselves: mass death, destroyed families, and a generation of Gazan children growing up in the shadow of buzzing machines that rain death without warning.

Drones Don’t “Miss”—They Are Directed to Kill

Israel’s propaganda machine insists that its drone strikes are surgical. But the images from Gaza contradict this. Charred children. Shredded tents. Burned family members who were simply seeking shelter.

The claim of “precision” is a smokescreen. In reality, suicide drones are part of a broader strategy to erode Gaza’s social fabric—to make even moments of rest or play a potential death sentence. By normalizing this new method of warfare, Israel is writing a new chapter in the playbook of modern war crimes.

20 April 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

Hi there–

I hope you’re well? Another tumultuous week– and yet another totally horrendous week for the people of Gaza. They have now passed seven weeks since the Israeli military slapped a total, wall-to-wall ban on the entry of any goods, even basic necessities, into the Gaza Strip.

That blockade– and the repeated, extremely deadly assaults from air, land, and sea the Israelis have undertaken against Gaza over the past month– have been complete violations of the agreement the Israeli government and the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) signed on January 15, which stipulated an 18-week period of ceasefire with each successive 6-week period seeing additional relief for Gaza’s hard-pressed population along with the release of additional numbers of captives by each side.

Israel has also, meanwhile, pushed the survivors among Gaza’s once- 2.3. million people into ever smaller zones within Gaza. On the UN-OCHA map here (click on it to see it better, or download the whole PDF here), Gaza’s Palestinians are now forbidden from entering all the zones shaded purple or red.

Where is international law, you may ask?

Where are the Geneva Conventions?

Where are international institutions like the United Nations, a body that was born from the defeat of the largest-scale perpetrator of genocide ever seen in the 20th century?

The United State, under most of its presidents in recent times including former Pres. Biden, has frequently used Washington’s privileged position within the U.N. to openly flout international law and to give “ironclad” support to Israel as it has also done the same.

Pres. Trump is now taking that scofflawery to totally unprecedented new levels. In international affairs as in domestic affairs he has taken a wrecking ball to institutions and norms that, while never perfect, have nonetheless proved their value over time and were previously capable of improvement.

Here within the U.S., the long-established norms of constitutional government seem to mean nothing to trump. The NYT columnist Ezra Klein– never a firebrand– phrased it well in this hard-hitting column today about the fate of deported immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia:

To the Trump administration, Abrego Garcia is not a mistake. He is a liability, and he is a test. A test of their power to do this to anyone. A test of whether the loophole they believe they have found — that if they can get you on a plane, they can hustle you beyond our laws and leave you in the grips of the kind of gulags they wish they had here.

They are not ashamed of this. They are not denying their desire to do it to more people.
This is how dictatorships work. Trump has always been clear about who he is and the kind of power he wants. Now he is using that power.

And everyone around him — including Marco Rubio, Pam Bondi, Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem — is defending his right to wield that power.

There is a clear, open gleefulness in the way Trump (and his foot-soldier Salvador’s President Bukele) talk about what they have done to Abrego Garcia– and to untold scores of other immigrants herded off to Bukele’s mega-prisons. This gleefulness is shocking and deeply unsettling. It is also deeply familiar to anyone who has followed the way Israeli military commanders, Defense Ministers, and foot-soldiers all openly brag about the atrocities they have already committed in Gaza, and the future ones they’re planning.

The cruelty and the open and sadistic displays of it are the point. It is a clear attempt to terrorize the rest of the public into submission.

Four years ago, I spent some months on a project to track the earliest years of the attempts that a number of White, West-European polities pursued to build sprawling empires that for the first time in human history were transoceanic and thus reliant on excellent command of shipbuilding, navigation– and naval gunnery. The first polity to launch such a project was not Spain, but Portugal. In 2021 I summarized my understanding of that effort in this piece, published free on Medium.

In a later piece I summarized the new features that building a transoceanic empire– as opposed to the kind of land-based empire that many polities have built throughout history– now allowed. Key among them was its “hit and run” capability: The people who ran these new kinds of empire no longer had to establish mechanisms that would allow their own people live alongside the peoples they had conquered. They could– and did– genocide the Indigenes wholesale, force them into slavery, and if too many of them objected the European rulers could simply round them up in large numbers and trans-ship them to a distant corner of the empire to provide unpaid slave labor there…

Sounds familiar, huh.

… Anyway, this morning I decided to reconnect with that work I did back in 2021, drawing a straight-ish line back from the cruelty that we see Trump and Netanyahu deploying against Brown people today to the cruelty the Portuguese deployed against Indigenous communities on the shores of the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea, in the early 1500s.

I think it’s important to recognize that the deployment (and open celebration) of cruelty against non-White people is a clear feature of all the White empires that have dominated the global balance for the past 500 years. It is not a bug.

Anyway, here’s the piece I wrote on my Globalities platform about this, today. (The Bab El Mandeb Straits were a key location back in 1506 CE, for what it’s worth, just as they are today.)

I hope this essay might energize all of us to work harder to end the stranglehold that the tiny, less than 12 percent of humanity who are of West European origin have exercised over world affairs for far too long…

Maybe, just maybe, with Trump’s latest, deranged economic war against the rest of the world, we might hope to see that stranglehold being broken soon?

But Gaza is still the fulcrum. The suffering there is unbearable. And it is all being fueled and actively supported by my government, using my tax dollars to destroy the lives of my friends.

20 April 2025

By Chris Hedges

“Once a regime starts to send people to concentration camps — including those in El Salvador — it creates a system of detention that eschews due process and disappears citizens into black holes.

16 Apr 2025 – Our offshore concentration camps, for now, are in El Salvador and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. But don’t expect them to remain there. Once they are normalized, not only for U.S.-deported immigrants and residents, but U.S. citizens, they will migrate to the homeland. It is a very short leap from our prisons, already rife with abuse and mistreatment, to concentration camps, where those held are cut off from the outside world — “disappeared” — denied legal representation and crammed into fetid, overcrowded cells.

Prisoners in the camps in El Salvador are forced to sleep on the floor or in solitary confinement in the dark. Many suffer from tuberculosis, fungal infections, scabies, severe malnutrition and chronic digestive illnesses. The inmates, including over 3,000 children, are fed rancid food. They endure beatings. They are tortured, including by water-boarding or being forced naked into barrels of ice-cold water, according to Human Rights Watch. In 2023, the State Department described imprisonment as “life-threatening,” and that was before the Salvadoran government declared a “state of exception” in March 2022. The situation has been greatly “exacerbated,” the State Department notes, by the “addition of 72,000 detainees under the state of exception.” Some 375 people have died in the camps since the state of exception was established, part of El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s “war on gangs,” according to the local human rights group Socorro Jurídico Humanitario.

These camps — the “Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo” (Center for Terrorism Confinement) known as CECOT, to which U.S. deportees are being sent, holds some 40,000 people — are the model, the harbinger of what awaits us.

Metal worker and union member Kilmar Ábrego García, who was abducted in front of his five-year-old son on March 12, 2025, was accused of being a gang member and sent to El Salvador. The Supreme Court agreed with District Judge Paula Xinis who found that García’s deportation was an “illegal act.” Trump officials blamed their deportation of García on an “administrative error.” Xinis ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” his return. But that does not mean he is coming back.

“I hope you’re not suggesting that I smuggle a terrorist into the United States,” Bukele told the press at a White House meeting with Trump. “How can I smuggle — how can I return him to the United States? Like, I smuggle him into the United States? Well, of course I’m not going to do it…the question is preposterous.”

This is the future. Once a segment of the population is demonized — including U.S. citizens Trump labels “homegrown criminals” — once they are stripped of their humanity, once they embody evil and are seen as an existential threat, the end result is that these human “contaminants” are removed from society. Guilt or innocence, at least under the law, is irrelevant. Citizenship offers no protection.

“The first essential step on the road to total domination is to kill the juridical person in man,” writes Hannah Arendt in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” “This was done, on the one hand, by putting certain categories of people outside the protection of the law and forcing at the same time, through the instrument of denationalization, the nontotalitarian world into recognition of lawlessness; it was done, on the other, by placing the concentration camp outside the normal penal system, and by selecting inmates outside the normal judicial procedure in which a definite crime entails a predictable penalty.”

Those who build concentration camps build societies of fear. They issue relentless warnings of mortal danger, whether from immigrants, Muslims, traitors, criminals or terrorists. Fear spreads slowly, like a sulfurous gas, until it infects all social interactions and induces paralysis. It takes time. In the first years of the Third Reich, the Nazis operated ten camps with about 10,000 inmates. But once they managed to crush all competing centers of power — labor unions, political parties, an independent press, universities and the Catholic and Protestant churches — the concentration camp system exploded. By 1939, when World War II broke out, the Nazis were running over 100 concentration camps with some one million inmates. Death camps followed.

Those that create these camps give them wide publicity. They are designed to intimidate. Their brutality is their selling point. Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp, was not, as Richard Evans writes in “The Coming of The Third Reich” “an improvised solution to an unexpected problem of overcrowding in the goals, but a long-planned measure that the Nazis had envisioned virtually from the very beginning. It was widely publicized and reported in the local, regional and national press, and served as a stark warning to anyone contemplating offering resistance to the Nazi regime.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, wearing plainclothes and circling neighborhoods in unmarked cars, kidnap legal residents such as Mahmoud Khalil. These abductions replicate those I witnessed on streets of Santiago, Chile under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, or in San Salvador, El Salvador’s capital, during the military dictatorship.

ICE is swiftly evolving into our homegrown version of the Gestapo or The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD). It oversees 200 detention facilities. It is a formidable domestic surveillance agency that has amassed data on most Americans, according to a report compiled by The Center of Privacy & Technology at Georgetown.

“By reaching into the digital records of state and local governments and buying databases with billions of data points from private companies, ICE has created a surveillance infrastructure that enables it to pull detailed dossiers on nearly anyone, seemingly at any time,” the report reads. “In its efforts to arrest and deport, ICE has — without any judicial, legislative or public oversight — reached into datasets containing personal information about the vast majority of people living in the U.S., whose records can end up in the hands of immigration enforcement simply because they apply for driver’s licenses; drive on the roads; or sign up with their local utilities to get access to heat, water and electricity.”

Those abducted, including the Turkish national and PhD student at Tufts University, Rümeysa Öztürk, are accused of amorphous behaviour such as “engaging in activities in support of Hamas.” But this is a subterfuge, accusations no more real than the invented crimes under Stalinism where people were accused of belonging to the old order — Kulaks or members of the petit bourgeoisie — or were convicted for plotting to overthrow the regime as Trotskyites, Titoites, agents of capitalism or saboteurs, known as “wreckers.” Once a category of people is targeted, the crimes they are charged with, if they are charged at all, are almost always fabrications.

Concentration camp inmates are severed from the outside world. They are disappeared. Erased. They are treated as if they never existed. Nearly all efforts to obtain information about them are met with silence. Even their death, should they die in custody, becomes anonymous, as if they were never born.

Those who run concentration camps, as Hannah Arendt writes, are people without the curiosity or the mental capacity to form opinions. They don’t, she notes, “even know any more what it means to be convinced.” They simply obey, conditioned to act as “perverted animals.” They are intoxicated by the God-like power they have to turn human beings into quivering flocks of sheep.

The goal of any concentration camp system is to destroy all individual traits, to mold people into fearful, docile, obedient masses. The first camps are training grounds for prison guards and ICE agents. They master the brutal techniques designed to infantilize inmates, an infantilization that soon warps the wider society.

The 250 purported Venezuelan gang members shipped to El Salvador in defiance of a federal court were denied due process. They were summarily herded onto planes, which ignored the judge’s order to turn back, and once they arrived, were stripped, beaten and had their heads shaved. Shaved heads are a feature of all concentration camps. The excuse is lice. But of course it is about depersonalization and why they are in uniforms and identified by numbers.

The autocrat openly revels in the cruelty. “I look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20 year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Perhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions!”

Those that build concentration camps are proud of them. They show them off to the press, or at least the sycophants posing as the press. Secretary for Homeland Security Kristi Noem, who posted a video of herself visiting the El Salvadoran prison, used the shirtless and head shaved inmates as a stage prop for her threats against immigrants. If fascism does one thing well, it is spectacle.

First they come for the immigrants. Then they come for the activists on foreign student visas on college campuses. Then they come for green card holders. Next are the U.S. citizens who fight Israeli genocide or the creeping fascism. Then they come for you. Not because you broke the law. But because the monstrous machine of terror needs a constant supply of victims to sustain itself.

Totalitarian regimes survive by eternally battling mortal, existential threats. Once one threat is eradicated, they invent another. They mock the rule of law. Judges, until they are purged, may decry this lawlessness, but they have no mechanism to enforce their rulings. The Department of Justice, turned over to the Trump sycophant Pam Bondi, is, as in all autocracies, designed to block enforcement, not facilitate it. There are no legal impediments left to protect us. We know where this is going. We have seen it before. And it is not good.

______________________________________________

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief.

21 April 2025

Source: transcend.org

By Alex Galbraith

Trump has a rosy take on the early days of his ‘war on the world.’ “I’m telling you these countries are calling us up, kissing my ass. They’re dying to make a deal.”

8 Apr 2025 – Donald Trump‘s tariff scheme has upended the stock market and cast the United States’ diplomatic ties into doubt, but you wouldn’t know it if you listened to the president.

Neither hide nor hair of the roiling economy made it into Trump’s speech before the National Republican Congressional Committee on Tuesday night. The president donned a tux to tell the GOP bigwigs his reciprocal tariff plan was going swimmingly.After briefly calling the tit-for-tat over import duties a “war on the world,” Trump repeatedly assured his party that everything was peachy. On the subject of peaches, he said that U.S. trade partners were waiting in line to pucker up.”I’m telling you these countries are calling us up, kissing my ass,” he said. “They’re dying to make a deal.”In his winding speech, the president called Adam Schiff a pencil-necked geek with a “watermelon head,” repeatedly insinuated that the 2020 election was stolen and told the assembled small gov crowd that states were merely agents of the federal government. But few of Trump’s discursive asides carried as much weight as the announcement that he planned to levy further tariffs on imported pharmaceuticals.”We’re gonna tariff our pharmaceuticals and once we do that they’re going to come rushing back,” he said. “The advantage we have over everybody is that we’re the big market. We’re going to be announcing very shortly a major tariff on pharmaceuticals.”Trump also touted his 104% tariff on imported Chinese goods, refusing the framing that tariffs are taxes. (A tariff is, by definition, a tax.) He stuck to his talking point that America was being “ripped off” by countries that imported less from the U.S. than they exported to the U.S.

“They’ve ripped us off left and right, but now it’s our turn to do the ripping,” he shared, before saying that China would pay a “big number” to the Treasury. “Don’t let them keep telling you that this is a tax on our people. I hate that.

‘They are kissing my ass’: Trump says countries are pleading to negotiate tariffs

__________________________________________

Alex Galbraith is Salon’s nights & weekends editor.

21 April 2025

Source: transcend.org

By Prof. Richard Falk

16 Apr 2025 – Over time, the role of the Special Rapporteur as established by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate and report upon Israel violations of human rights in Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967, has gradually assumed increasing importance as a source of reliable information and enlightening analysis. The position of SR is both unpaid and demanding, and is aggravated recently by often harmful and always hurtful defamatory attacks from pro-Israeli NGOs, most notably UN Watch based in Geneva and NGO Monitor with headquarters in New York City. It is a fact that the SR influence has grown over time as have the intensity of these attacks on the SR truth-bearing messengers. The mean spirited attacks seem to have as their main purpose a diversion of attention away from the message. Ms. Albanese’s experience was preceded by that of the SR signatories of the support letter below. Our milder although similar experience of defamation is set forth in the course of a book entitled Protecting Human Rights in Occupied Palestine: Working through the United Nations, Clarity Press, 2022,  with a foreword by Ms. Albanese.

This double dynamic has reached its climax during the first three-year term of Francesca Albanese tenure as SR that happened to coincide with Israel’s genocidal response to the October 7 Hamas-led attack, which instead of opposition elicited the active complicity of North American and leading European governments and the passive complicity of Arab and many other governments around the world, with a few notable exceptions, including South Africa, Colombia, and Chile. In this period, the excellence of Ms. Albanese’s SR reports made a major impact on civil society awareness. They added professional competence as to why allegations of Israeli genocide were well-grounded in law and fact. Her energetic and courageous high visibility talks in all parts of the world at the invitation of a great variety of organizations made her a prime target of vicious smears by Zionist support groups, especially in the West, characterizing her without a shred of evidence as ‘a notorious antisemite.’ As with Israeli bombing of Gaza, Israel’s acknowledged intention is not to be accurate but to inflict maximum damage. In this case, the battlefields are symbolic yet the blood of victims spills.

This pattern of increased reliance on SR reports also reflects an awareness of Israel’s formidable, sophisticated, and well-funded efforts to shape the public discourse on Israel/Palestine, and the acceptance by the most influential Western media platforms of a one-sided approach that gives consistent priority to Israel’s spin on developments in Gaza and the West Bank. The separate reports of the SR to the Human Rights Council and General Assembly each year have become the go-to source trustworthy relevant information and analysis for anyone seeking objective assessments of the ongoing  Palestinian ordeal, now reaching a peak with the connivance of the Trump presidency and a totally subservient Congress.

We welcome this opportunity to congratulate Francesco Albanese on the renewal of her second three-year term, and take note of the shameful effort of Israel, US, Germany, and a few other UN members to end the Mandate concerned with Occupied Palestine altogether. Given the personal abuse to which she was subjected, it is a tribute to Ms. Albanese commitment and courage that she is willing to endure further abuse for another three years.

We celebrate her achievements, and join with those who feel that a Nobel Peace Prize would be a highly deserved recognition of her contributions to peace and justice to so recognize her achievements. Some are even suggesting that her credentials of service to the UN while under fire make her an ideal candidate to become the first female Secretary General of the Organization. The UN needs a person that can take the heat of abusive criticism at a time when the UN’s most powerful member is an undisguised opponent of internationalism and even cooperative problem-solving on a global scale. Given these realities it is almost inconceivable that such an inspirational choice will be made at the UN any time soon. Among other hurdles, it would only become technically possible in the highly unlikely event that the five permanent members of the Security Council gave their approval.

Should I ever be asked, Francesca would certainly receive my vote based on her extraordinary performance but also as an expression of my hopes for a stronger, more relevant UN in the future when called upon with a sense of urgency to stop genocide and uphold global security in the manner set forth in the UN Charter.

*************************************************

SR Letter to Jürg Lauber

3 April 2025

To your excellency, Jürg Lauber, President of the Human Rights Council

We write as former Special Rapporteurs of the Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967 with reference to the reappointment of Francesca Albanese to this position. We are conversant with her work since becoming Special Rapporteur, which we commend, and for Jürg Laubers the basis for this message of enthusiastic support for her reappointment, which we understand is scheduled to be voted on 4 April 2025.

We have learned that a small number of governmental members of the HRC have indicated their intention to vote against Ms. Albanese. We find this show of opposition to be irresponsible and harmful to the United Nations, which stands for excellence of performance combined with accuracy and objectivity of analysis. Ms. Albanese has been confronted with extreme behavior on the part of Israel, including flagrant instances of disregard of basic provisions of international humanitarian law, international human rights law, and the Genocide and Apartheid Conventions, as well as those obligations incumbent on an Occupying Power to extend protection to the civilian population of the Occupied society in all circumstances. With insight and careful research Albanese has called world attention to these patterns of wrongdoing as is her duty as Special Rapporteur.

Against this background of Israel’s lawlessness, Ms. Albanese, by her reports and public appearances has brought these patterns of Israeli violation of international law to the attention of millions all over the planet. She is trusted by the many of the most influential media platforms and is a frequent participant in webinars, academic conferences, and media events. Under the most difficult of circumstances, she is doing exactly what she is supposed to do as a UN SR. Having ourselves been attacked unfairly and inaccurately when similarly acting on behalf of the UN we feel great sympathy for our friend Francesca who has been mercilessly smeared and misrepresented in this unseemly effort by Israel and its partisans to shift attention from her message to her alleged lack of credibility as a messenger due to the diversionary slur of being a ‘virulent antisemite.’

As suggested, we not only ardently support reappointment, but believe the work of Ms Albanese should be formally acknowledged and praised by the top echelons of UN officials. In our judgment, she has received in the past insufficient support in carrying out difficult missions on behalf of the UN in her unpaid role as SR operating in a particularly dangerous atmosphere. She has the right to expect to be insulated from such irresponsible and false invective. We hope that you will be able to congratulate Francesca Albanese after she is reappointed tomorrow.

Respectfully yours,

John Dugard, Richard Falk and Michael Lynk

Prof. Richard Falk is a member of the TRANSCEND Network, Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, at Queen Mary University London, Research Associate the Orfalea Center of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Fellow of the Tellus Institute.

21 April 2025

Source: transcend.org

By Ahmed Adel

15 Apr 2025 –Xi recalled that China and the EU are “firm defenders” of free trade and that “there are no winners in a tariff war.”

Brussels is seeking to diversify relations with other powers due to the threat of economic recession. For this reason, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is leading the European Union’s rapprochement with China in an effort to expand markets and reduce the trade deficit. While Sánchez says the rapprochement “isn’t against anyone” and Beijing says it places bilateral ties “at the forefront,” Washington criticizes it.

“Spain is a deeply pro-European country that sees China as a partner of the European Union,” Sánchez assured Chinese President Xi Jinping during their meeting, where he emphasized that Spanish foreign policy “is not against anyone.”

Following the Spanish prime minister’s third official visit to China in just two years, the signing of two export protocols (on pork products and cherries) and various agreements on scientific, technological, educational, and film matters was announced. Previously, Sánchez met with representatives of major Chinese companies in the automotive, battery, and green energy sectors that he hoped would invest in Spain.

On the eve of Xi’s meeting with Sánchez, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian stated that bilateral relations with Spain are “at the forefront” of its ties with EU member states.

Under the current geopolitical conditions, political dialogue can be cultivated to strengthen the relationship between China and the EU.

The US-provoked tariff war and the reciprocal responses from China led to a global stock market collapse and investor panic, leading to US President Donald Trump announcing a temporary (90-day) suspension of tariffs on those countries (around 75) that requested negotiations with Washington. Faced with this new scenario, the EU, which on April 9 had approved the imposition of a series of 25% tariffs on nearly 1,700 US products, suspended its application for the same period and announced its willingness to enter negotiations.

“If negotiations are not satisfactory, our countermeasures will kick in,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen clarified.

21 April 2025

Source: transcend.org

By Devin Watkins

Pope Francis has died on Easter Monday aged 88

Pope Francis died today, 21 Apr 2025, at his residence in the Vatican’s Casa Santa Marta.

At 9:45 am, Cardinal Kevin Farrell, Camerlengo of the Holy Roman Church, announced the death of Pope Francis from the Casa Santa Marta with these words:

“Dearest brothers and sisters, with deep sorrow I must announce the death of our Holy Father Francis. At 7:35 this morning, the Bishop of Rome, Francis, returned to the house of the Father. His entire life was dedicated to the service of the Lord and of His Church. He taught us to live the values of the Gospel with fidelity, courage, and universal love, especially in favor of the poorest and most marginalized. With immense gratitude for his example as a true disciple of the Lord Jesus, we commend the soul of Pope Francis to the infinite merciful love of the One and Triune God.”

The Pope was admitted to the Agostino Gemelli Polyclinic Hospital on Friday, February 14, 2025, after suffering from a bout of bronchitis for several days.

Pope Francis’ clinical situation gradually worsened, and his doctors diagnosed bilateral pneumonia on Tuesday, February 18.

After 38 days in hospital, the late Pope returned to his Vatican residence at the Casa Santa Marta to continue his recovery.

As he aged, Pope Francis frequently suffered bouts of respiratory illnesses, even cancelling a planned visit to the United Arab Emirates in November 2023 due to influenza and lung inflammation.

In April 2024, the late Pope Francis approved an updated edition of the liturgical book for papal funeral rites, which will guide the funeral Mass which has yet to be announced.

The second edition of the Ordo Exsequiarum Romani Pontificis introduces several new elements, including how the Pope’s mortal remains are to be handled after death.

The ascertainment of death takes place in the chapel, rather than in the room where he died, and his body is immediately placed inside the coffin.

According to Archbishop Diego Ravelli, Master of Apostolic Ceremonies, the late Pope Francis had requested that the funeral rites be simplified and focused on expressing the faith of the Church in the Risen Body of Christ.

“The renewed rite,” said Archbishop Ravelli, “seeks to emphasize even more that the funeral of the Roman Pontiff is that of a pastor and disciple of Christ and not of a powerful person of this world.”

21 April 2025

Source: transcend.org

Against the U.S. Aggression on Yemen
In Support of the Position of the Yemeni People in Confronting the Genocide in Occupied Palestine

Joint Statement and Appeal
(Issued by the Yemeni National Team for Foreign Outreach and the Masar Badil, the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement)

We once again condemn the ongoing savage and barbaric U.S. aggression against the Yemeni people and their civilian and economic institutions. We also condemn the disgraceful and cowardly official Arab silence, and every complicit stance or participation in justifying this heinous crime by some Arab and Islamic states and regimes in the region. At the same time, we extend our sincere revolutionary salutes to the valiant Yemeni armed forces who stand with pride, dignity, and confidence alongside the Palestinian people in confronting the crimes of the Zionist entity and its ongoing genocide under U.S. sponsorship. The Yemeni armed forces—by the grace of God—are confronting the aggression carried out by the U.S. to aid the “Israeli” enemy and will continue their support operations for the oppressed Palestinian people until the aggression on Gaza ceases and the siege is lifted.

In this joint statement, issued in eight languages, we call upon friends, comrades, and revolutionary forces around the world for the broadest possible global popular mobilization against the Zionist genocide, and to continue international popular efforts to prosecute the “Israeli” war criminals and their murderous, criminal allies in the White House. We join our voices with those of peoples, forces, and liberation movements that confront the crimes of imperialism, occupation, fascism, and racism, and that support the just liberation struggle of the Palestinian people and their legitimate resistance to liberate Palestine, from the river to the sea, and to uproot the racist Zionist settler-colonial occupation and its agents in the region and the world.

The American weapons that kill innocents, target civilians, destroy water reservoirs, burn agricultural land, and bomb infrastructure and public civilian facilities in Yemen are the very same weapons that destroy homes, schools, and hospitals in the Gaza Strip, the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria. These weapons are produced by the same death factories and U.S. and Western corporations. They aim to entrench American hegemony and serve the same ruling classes. Accordingly, we call upon the free people of the world, especially in the United States, to launch a popular campaign against what is called the “American military-industrial complex.” We call for the imposition of a military embargo on “Israel” and for preventing countries and companies from supplying the Zionist occupation entity with tools of killing and extermination.

We reaffirm: Despite the ferocity and power of the brutal war machine and the destruction, death, and suffering it causes, the Palestinian and Yemeni peoples stand as one, unified army on the frontlines against imperialism, Zionism, and reaction. Together, they present an authentic revolutionary model to the Arab and Islamic peoples and the free people of the world, and they outline the path of ongoing revolution, the features of universal liberation, and the direction of the honest and trustworthy human compass—not only in our region, but also for all the peoples of the Global South and for all humanity that still suffers under the weight of fear, repression, poverty, exploitation, state terror, and the policies of subordinate client regimes.

We in the National Team for Foreign Outreach and the Masar Badil: Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement call, through this joint statement, upon all the free people of the world to support the position of the Yemeni people, its leadership, and its army. We also renew our call to end the aggression and the siege imposed on the Yemeni people by the United States and its allies, and we call on the free peoples to rally around the clear revolutionary stances expressed by the Yemeni people around the clock, in squares and public arenas, affirming their resolve and will, and that they will not retreat, tire, or surrender—but will remain steadfast in their historic position in support of the oppressed Palestinian people and their heroic resistance in Gaza and all of occupied Palestine.

The revolutionary humanitarian stance is embodied in the slogan “You Are Not Alone,” shouted by millions of Yemeni voices for Palestine. It is affirmed by the masses under sun and rain, with weapons, blood, and sacrifice, and it is carried by men, women, the elderly, and children in the squares and arenas of Yemen. This revolutionary slogan today represents a human and faith-based wisdom, and a strong cry that terrifies the entities of occupation, darkness, and dependency. It expresses the will of a defiant people who will neither surrender nor kneel before enemies. We want this sincere slogan “You Are Not Alone” to become an international slogan and stance, echoed by the vanguards of the peoples in every city and capital, and in every field liberated by the will of the masses and their free conscience.

Long live Palestine, free and independent
Long live Yemen, free, proud, and independent
Freedom for Palestine from the river to the sea

National Team for Foreign Outreach – Yemen
Masar Badil: Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement

19 April 2025

Source: masarbadil.org

By Prof. Richard Falk

28 Mar 2025

In this unmissable, must-watch conversation, Professor Richard Falk—international law expert, former UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine, and leading scholar on global justice—breaks down the complexities of international law, the right of resistance, and the enforcement gaps in global governance.

From the historic context of decolonization to the current war in Gaza, Falk sheds light on the accountability challenges facing Israel and the role of civil society in pushing for change. Listen to his insights on the urgent need for justice-driven action and the role of geopolitical dynamics in shaping the international order.

UNMISSABLE: Do Palestinians Have the Right to Resist? w/ Richard Falk

Prof. Richard Falk is a member of the TRANSCEND Network, Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, at Queen Mary University London, Research Associate the Orfalea Center of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Fellow of the Tellus Institute.

7 April 2025

Source: transcend.org