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Dr. Guy Bechor: After Hamas brutally beat those it accused of being "thieves" and even wrote "thief" on their backs (and some of them were mere political opponents), a video that the IDF spokesman even circulated [link] around the world, Hamas gave an order to carry out a brutal lynching of them: They were stoned to death by the mob, the most brutal form of death, on video. The beauty of "the day after". After the official Hamas announcement, that it will be the ruler of the Strip and no one else, and therefore will return to sitting over the...

For six kilometres the road is a dusty moonscape without a hint of civilian life. The Netzarim corridor, as Israel calls it, slices across Gaza’s narrow waist, from its border with Israel to its Mediterranean coast. The buildings on both sides have been pancaked into piles of rubble. As a convoy bounces along the rutted track, there are no Palestinians in sight, only Israeli soldiers and army vehicles and a constant swirl of grit. And then there is a dazzle of blue: the corridor ends at the sea, and the hulking steel pier that America spent $230m to install on...

In Canada Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Special Rapporteur on foreign interference stepping down tonight... A US official speaking anonymously says that Secretary of State Antony Blinken is to visit China... There's been a terrorist attack on a beachfront hotel in Mogadishu, Somalia... Mass demonstrations in Serbia continue following mass murder incidents in the country involving firearms... "He is a Coward and a Thug" Some of the response from President Trump tonight to the Biden Administration Special Prosecutor Jack Smith... In Colombia the leftist President Gustavo Petro agreeing to a six-month cease-fire with the left-wing... Air raid warnings across multiple regions...

I had planned to write about the strikingly impressive strategy of the U.S. and its allies to send large shipments of aid to starving Venezuelans instead of Marines, all in a bid to persuade Venezuela's military to finally come over to support President Juan Guaidó and effectively boot the detested socialist dictatorship.  The idea was to get the Venezuelan military to allow U.S. and other neighborly aid shipments through to help the starving people, which would in fact require defying the Maduro dictatorship. We have an answer, at least for the moment: they aren't. Here's a report from AFP: Venezuelan military officers blocked a bridge on the border...

Here's a Tip: Don't Give North Korea More Aid "No matter what promises North Korea makes and agreements North Korea signs, nothing is likely to change." Doug Bandow August 9, 2015 Shenyang, China: North Korea is a major topic of interest in this provincial capital in China’s northeast. The “Hermit Kingdom” is just a couple hours away by car. Pyongyang sends diplomats and students to Shenyang while attempting to stem the flow of refugees. Again the North’s harvest does not look good. Observers warn that another famine may be coming. The first reports of drought appeared earlier this year. The...

This comes from a UK journalist embedded with the Iraqi military. I wouldn’t treat it as final. Some other reports really raise questions about the 70% number and even the quotes in his own account don’t lead me to believe that such a huge number have died.But it’s safe to say that quite a few are dead. Mount Sinjar stinks of death. The few Yazidis who have managed to escape its clutches can tell you why. “Dogs were eating the bodies of the dead,” said Haji Khedev Haydev, 65, who ran through the lines of Islamic State jihadists surrounding it.On...

Nearly one-third of Americans received government-funded food aid in 2012, according to a new report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).As Heritage Foundation expert Robert Rector has explained, there are roughly a dozen federal food assistance programs operating today. The USDA reports that 59 percent of households that participated in one of the four largest food assistance programs—food stamps, school breakfasts, school lunches, and WIC—end up receiving benefits from “two or more programs.” This indicates significant duplication, “providing participants total benefits in excess of 100 percent of daily nutritional needs.”The welfare system also operates many means-tested welfare programs...

The United Nations was paying one of the world’s most notorious terrorist groups after getting “too close” to it, secret documents disclose. The UN World Food Programme (WFP) had to suspend activities in southern Somalia after being manipulated by al-Shabaab, which is linked to al-Qaeda. In a meeting last year with the UN ambassador Susan Rice, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the special representative for Somalia, said the WFP had been withdrawn “because it had become too reliant upon al-Shabaab and its system of pay-offs”. Al-Shabaab, an Islamic group fighting to overthrow the Somalian government, controls much of south and central Somalia and...

N.Korea food aid program acutely short of funds UN aid agencies have appealed for more international funding for food aid to North Korea, saying donors have provided less than a fifth of the amount needed this year. The World Food Program and other UN bodies met in New York on Monday with officials from North Korea's donors, including Japan, South Korea and the United States. The meeting was closed to the media. But sources say UN officials explained that they need 218-million dollars to deliver food to the North this year, but that international contributions so far have reached only...

U.S. won’t donate good food to North, says King June 04, 2011 Robert King, a U.S. special envoy who traveled to North Korea last week, said Wednesday that if the United States restarts food aid to the communist country, it’s not going to send good stuff that would be diverted to the military, including rice. “The kinds of food we provide would be the kinds of foods that are less desirable for the elite, for the military,” King told the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee Wednesday. “For example, we would not provide rice. We would focus on some kind of...

Comments made by Carter stir consternation Seoul officials bristle at apparent dig at South on giving food aid to North April 27, 2011 Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, center, arrives at Pyongyang airport yesterday. Carter is in Pyongyang for a three-day visit in an effort to ease tensions on the Korean Peninsula. [XINHUA/YONHAP] Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and his three fellow Elders arrived in Pyongyang yesterday to speak with North Korean officials on bettering relations with South Korea and the country’s lack of food. But before his departure from Beijing, Carter raised heckles in Seoul by saying the food...

SNIPPET: "PESHAWAR, Pakistan - Two suicide bombers dressed in burqas blew themselves up Saturday in a camp for refugees fleeing military offensives in northwestern Pakistan, killing 41 people and wounding 62, officials said. The blasts occurred at a food distribution point..."

UNITED NATIONS - Up to half the food aid intended for the millions of hungry people in Somalia is being diverted to corrupt contractors, radical Islamic militants and local U.N. workers, according to a U.N. Security Council report. The report blames the problem on improper food distribution by the U.N. World Food Program in the African nation, which has been plagued by fighting and humanitarian suffering for nearly two decades, according to a U.N. diplomat. The diplomat spoke on condition of anonymity because the report has not yet been released. It calls on U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to authorize an...

US: NKorea rejects US food aid By FOSTER KLUG, Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON – The United States says North Korea is rejecting American food aid. State Department spokesman Robert Wood says the North gave no reason for rejecting U.S. food shipments. But the decision comes amid a nuclear standoff and North Korean plans to launch a satellite into space next month. Wood says the U.S. will work with non-governmental organizations to help make sure the food already in North Korea gets to the needy. The North faces chronic food shortages and relies on outside aid to feed its people.

Report: US in talks with UN food agency to give NKorea rice aid AP - Friday, March 28 SEOUL, South Korea - The United States is in talks with the U.N. food agency about providing North Korea with 500,000 tons of rice aid, news reports quoted South Korea's foreign minister as saying while visiting Washington. ADVERTISEMENT The proposal is being held up, however, by the North's refusal to grant appropriate monitoring aimed at ensuring that the rice would not be diverted for other purposes, Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan said without elaborating. "It's difficult to understand that an agreement cannot be...

Global Changes Skew Calculus Of Food Aid For N. Korea By Blaine Harden Washington Post Foreign Service Saturday, March 15, 2008; A01 SEOUL -- A grim rite of spring in Northeast Asia is the calculation of how many North Koreans could starve before the fall harvest -- and what the neighbors are willing to do about it. This year, though, the famine bailout season is more urgent, more complicated and more politically explosive than at any time since the mid-1990s, when millions starved behind North Korea's closed borders. Severe crop failure in the North, surging global prices for food and...

China halts rail freight to N Korea By Anna Fifield in Seoul and Richard McGregor in Beijing Published: October 18 2007 23:06 | Last updated: October 18 2007 23:06 China suspended key rail freight services into North Korea last week after 1,800 wagons carrying food aid and tradeable goods crossed into Kim Jong-il’s hermit state but were never returned. Absconding with Chinese wagons would be a strange move for North Korea because Beijing is Pyongyang’s closest political ally and biggest provider of food, goods and oil. Analysts monitoring North Korea said Chinese officials had privately complained to them that the...

Mugabe refuses to seek food aidTHE first time Knowledge Mbanda found a dead baby in the drains of Harare, he was horrified. “It is completely against our culture to abandon children,” he said. “I thought it must be of a woman who had been raped or a prostitute.” But now he and fellow council workers find at least 20 corpses of newborn babies each week, thrown away or even flushed down the lavatories of Zimbabwe’s capital. The dumping of babies, along with what doctors describe as a “dramatic” increase in malnourished children in city hospitals, is the most shocking illustration...

U.S. Senator Urges Bolton to Demand Stricter Monitoring of Aid to N. Korea By Joshua Stanton, Correspondent in Washington [ 2006-03-06 14:31 ] U.S. Senator Sam Brownback has written to John Bolton, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, criticizing the World Food Program's latest aid proposal for North Korea. In his letter, Brownback urges Bolton to "use [his] influence" to tighten monitoring requirements to meet "the most basic contingent requirements on aid." Brownback's letter characterizes the WFP's proposal, which would almost completely eliminate the monitoring of food aid distribution, as "overly compliant to the DPRK's demands." Numerous NGO's have accused...

The Bush administration has canceled a planned shipment of 25,000 tons of food aid to North Korea later this month, citing concerns that the food will not reach those who need it. "We still think there are serious humanitarian needs in North Korea, but we cannot continue to supply food if we cannot even minimally assure that it will reach its intended recipients," the State Department said yesterday. The U.N. World Food Program (WFP), which distributes foreign aid, has been ordered by the North Koreans to cut most of its staff there by the end of December, a move that...