#south african medical interns

[thethief1996]

I can't stop thinking about the news out of Palestine. Israel is sieging al Shifa hospital. Videos of people's limbs being severed off are haunting (graphic video tw). The hospital has ran out of fuel and 39 babies in incubators are fending for their lives by themselves, because Israel has stationed snipers around the hospital and is shooting all medical crew that walks into their sight.

First, the narrative was Israel would never bomb hospitals. Now, the hospitals are Hamas bases. Then, we respect journalists. Now, we have a fucking kill list of journalists because they are Hamas collaborators. First, we are not letting fuel in until the hostages are released. Now, we are not accepting the hostages back because that would stop our ground invasion and let Hamas win. And I could go on about every single lie they're making up. If you look up "Hamas rape" on google, the first link leads to Times of Israel saying Israel has found no forensic evidence of sexual violence, and only one eyewitness testimony out of 3.5k people attending the rave. If you Google "Hamas beheaded babies" the top links say they have no evidence for the claim besides word of mouth from extremist soldiers. Israeli extremists think about the ugliest goriest scene they can make out in their sick heads, tell that to a international journalist and they run away with it like it's gospel.

And children are being killed in the name of these lies. Thousands are being displaced in images that remind me of the pictures of Tantura 75 years ago, with their hands up so the tanks don't shoot them. Amputees are leaving the hospitals in wheelchairs hours after their surgeries because they are being shot at. Elders who survived the Nakba on 48 are having to walk towards Southern Gaza on foot (imagine walking from one end of your city to the other on foot), displaced again. People are cheering for the haunting images of white phosphorus bombs being dropped over Gaza. Gazan workers who were arrested in the West Bank are being thrust back into the bombings wearing numbered labels.

This is not normal. We are seeing the early stages of the settler colonial genocide of an indigenous population. Native leaders who have visited Gaza say its refugee camps look eerily like reservations. We can stop this. For the first time we are able to see wide scale accounts from the hands of the people suffering the genocide, and Israel is so scared of it they have cut all communications in Gaza.

This is our litmus test. I think we have never seen more clearly, with Palestine, Armenia, Congo and Sudan how colonialism has made our world a rotten place to live in.

The South African apartheid collapsed due to boycotts. We have to do everything in our power to stop Israel's hegemony. Even talking to a group of friends about Palestine changes the status quo. There's no world where we can live peacefully if Israel accomplishes their goals.

Keep yourself updated and share Palestinian voices. Muna El-Kurd said every tweet is like a treasure to them, because their voices are repressed on social media and even on this very app. Make it your action item to share something about the Palestinian plight everyday. Here are some resources:

Al Jazeera, Anadolu Agency, Mondoweiss

Boycott Divest Sanction Movement

Palestinian Youth Movement is organizing protests and direct action against weapons factories across the US

Mohammed El-Kurd (twitter / instagram)

Muhammad Shehada (twitter)

Motaz Azaiza (instagram) - reporting directly from Gaza.

Hind Khudary - reporting directly from Gaza. Her husband and daughter moved South to run from the tanks but she stayed behind to record the genocide. The least we can do is not let her calls fall on deaf ears.

You can participate in boycotts wherever you are in the world, through BDS guidelines. Don't be overwhelmed by gigantic boycott lists. BDS explicitly targets only a few brands which have bigger impact. You can stop consuming from as many brands as you want, though, and by all means feel free to give a 1 star review to McDonalds, Papa John, Pizza Hut, Burger King and Starbucks. Right now, they are focusing on boycotting the following:

Carrefour, HP, Puma, Sabra, Sodastream, Ahava cosmetics, Israeli fruits and vegetables

Push for a cultural boycott - pressure your favorite artist to speak out on Palestine and cancel any upcoming performances on occupied territory (Lorde cancelled her gig in Israel because of this. It works.)

If you can, participate in direct action or donate.

Palestine Action works to shut down Israeli weapons factories in the UK and USA, and have successfully shut down one of their firms in London.Some of the activists are going on trial and are calling for mobilizing on court.

Palestinian Youth Movement is organizing direct actions to stop the shipping of wars to Israel. Follow them.

Educate yourself. Read into Palestinian history and the occupation. You can't common sense people out of decades of propaganda. If your arguments crumble when a zionist brings up the "disengagement of Gaza", you have to learn more.

Read Decolonize Palestine. They have 15 minute reads that concisely explain the occupation (and its colonial roots) and debunk popular myths, including pinkwashing.

Read on Palestine. Here's an amazing masterpost.

Verso Book Club is giving out free books on Palestine (I personally downloaded Ten Myths about Israel by Ilan Pappe. If you still believe in the two states solution, this book by an Israeli professor debunks it).

Call your representatives. The Labour Party in the UK had an emergency meeting after several councilors threatened to resign if they didn't condemn Israeli war crimes. Calling to show your complaints works, even more if you live in a country that funds genocide.

FOR PEOPLE IN THE USA: USCPR has developed this toolkit for calls, here's a document that autosends emails to your representatives and here's a toolkit by Ceasefire in Gaza NOW!

FOR PEOPLE IN EUROPE: Here's a toolkit by Voices in Europe for Peace targeting the European Parliament and one specific for almost all countries in Europe, including Germany, Ireland, Poland, Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands, Greece, Norway, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Finland, Austria, Belgium Romania and Ukraine

FOR PEOPLE IN THE UK: Friends of Al-Aqsa UK and Palestine Solidarity UK have made toolkits for calls and emails

FOR PEOPLE IN AUSTRALIA: Here's a toolkit by Stand With Palestine

FOR PEOPLE IN CANADA: Here's a toolkit by Indepent Jewish Voices for Canada

Join a protest. Here's a constantly updating list of protests:

Global calendar

Another global calendar (go to the instragram of the organizers to confirm your protest)

USA calendar

Australia calendar

Feel free to add more.

#free palestine #free gaza #save gaza #gaza under attack

[sayruq]

In a unanimous decision, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) said Israel had to act "without delay" to allow the "provision... of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance".

The latest ruling by the court in The Hague comes after South Africa asked it to bolster an order issued to Israel in January to take all measures to prevent genocidal acts in Gaza. South Africa said it had an obligation to act to prevent genocide as a signatory of the UN's 1948 Genocide Convention. The country has been highly critical of Israel's military operation in Gaza and its governing African National Congress (ANC) has a long history of solidarity with the Palestinian cause.

#yemen #jerusalem #tel aviv #current events #palestine #free palestine #gaza #free gaza #news on gaza #palestine news #news update #war news #war on gaza #south africa #icj case #famine #genocide #gaza genocide

[rebeccathenaturalist]

There are under 16,000 white rhinos left in the wild; the northern subspecies is functionally extinct, with only two older females left in the world. So all that remain are a few thousands southern white rhinos, to include those in captivity.

The guy who owned this white rhino ranch lobbied to have the South African ban on rhino horn sales lifted, even though there are international bans still in place such as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. He had cut the horns of his rhinos to keep them from being poached, and stored them away. In spite of having hundreds of millions of dollars worth of horns in his possession, he wasn't able to continue buying feed for 2,000 rhinoceroses, hence the sale.

I don't know whether that sale includes the detached horns or not. It's maddening that as we approach 2024 there are still people who will pay exorbitant fees for rhino horns as a medication even though there's zero evidence it has any effectiveness, and there are likely collectors who want one simply to have it due to their rarity. I don't know enough about the potential for legalizing trade in horns cut off of living rhinos with the aim of making poaching less lucrative to have an opinion either way, but having seen how much misrepresentation and outright lying can happen in the global trade of animal remains I'm not feeling optimistic about this as a solution.

I am, however, grateful that this massive herd of highly endangered animals--about 15% of the world population of white rhinos--are now in the hands of those who are going to get them back out into the wild, albeit in protected areas. Here's hoping that these rescued rhinos will be able to add more genetic diversity back into the wild populations and strengthen them for the future.

#rhinoceros #rhinos #ungulates #perissodactyla #mammals #wildlife #endangered species #endangered animals #extinction #nature #animals #conservation #environment #animal welfare #scicomm #charismatic megafauna #megafauna #rewilding #habitat restoration

[odinsblog]

“When I was a teenager and my family emigrated from the Soviet Union, basically we were waiting outside of Rome for our papers to come to the United States. And there was a Rabbi who would give Torah lessons to kids of these Jewish refugees waiting for their papers. Now, for most of us, this was the first Jewish education that we ever received because this was illegal in the Soviet Union, which was part of the impetus for some of our families leaving.

I was a Jew on my passport, not a Russian.

I was a Jew in my passport, in my school file, in my parents’ personnel files, my medical records. Everywhere you went, you were marked as a Jew. And yet, you could not have any Jewish education.

You could not practice Judaism or study Hebrew. And so, my very first Torah lesson took place when I was 14. And it was on Amalek, which was a people that set out to destroy the Hebrews.

The way that the Rabbi taught it, which is a very common way, was that every generation of Jews has its own Amalek to destroy us. And the only way to survive is to destroy Amalek ourselves. And, you know, that spoke to me when I was 14.

It gave a framework to what I had experienced, both as a kid growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust and a kid growing up with this really pervasive, [Russian] state-enforced antisemitism. But this is also the legend that Netanyahu and other Israeli officials have been wielding to justify the indiscriminate destruction of Gaza. That second part of the legend of Amalek, that you have to kill the seed of Amalek, is a biblical quote, being used now in the International Court of Justice by the South African lawyers to make their case that there is clear genocidal intent.

It's so crazy making, but also so familiar. And I think even 43 years later, I remember how comforting it was to fall into a sense of communal victimhood. Israel is the victim of October 7th and will be the victim of October 7th for a long time to come.

But people can be victims and perpetrators at the same time. This is actually one of the other great lessons of the 20th century. Israel was the victim of a horrific attack and a horrific series of crimes against humanity, and is at the same time now committing crimes against humanity.”

—Masha Gessen, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of, In the Shadow of the Holocaust

#politics #palestine #gaza #israel #masha gessen #amalek #war crimes #crimes against humanity #in the shadow of the holocaust #ethnic cleansing #israel is a terrorist state #collective punishment #🇵🇸 #antisemitism #russian fascism ☭ #anti zionism ≠ antisemitism #genocidal intent

[dwmmphotography]

On this Scavenger Sunday we're gonna explore a few species in recognition of yesterday being International Vulture Awareness Day (the first Saturday in September, always).

The California condor is the largest of the North American vultures. After nearly going extinct in the 1980s, their population is rebounding thanks to an extensive captive breeding and release program.

While the wild population of California condors is not self-sustaining yet, there are condors in the wild mating and rearing young. Like this fledgling seen at Navajo Bridge in Arizona. The dark head lightens as the bird ages. Since the population still requires close monitoring, wing-tags will be given when the bird is caught for a medical exam.

A more familiar sight in both North & South America is the condor's smaller cousin, the turkey vulture. The widest ranging of the New World Vultures, this relatively small species is known for using its well-developed sense of smell to locate food that can't be easily seen.

Another relatively small New World Vulture is the American black vulture. Keeping the gray/black skin of all young NWV into adulthood, the white primaries giving their wings an old timey cartoon glove look distinguishes them from the young of their cousins.

On the other end of the vulture spectrum is the Eurasian black vulture (cinereous vulture). One of the largest Old World Vulture species, these fashionably ruffed individuals are kings of the carcass across their range.

African close cousin to the cinereous vulture is the lappet-faced vulture. Their hefty bill allows them to open carcasses that defeat other species. Their pants are quite fluffy.

Sharing the skies of southern Africa with the lappet-faced vulture is the Cape griffon vulture. Similarly sized to the lappet-faced vulture, these gregarious birds look quite fancy with a bit of rat gut hanging from their mouth.

#my photos #bird photography #zoo photography #sunday is for scavengers #scavenger sunday #vulture #bird #california condor #turkey vulture #black vulture #american black vulture #eurasian black vulture #cinereous vulture #lappet-faced vulture #cape griffon vulture #cape vulture #ivad #ivad 2023 #international vulture awareness day #not zoo photography #navajo bridge #vermillion cliffs #Rio Madre de Dios #Peru #Arizona #Pueblo Zoo #Oregon zoo #abqbiopark #bandelier national monument

[workersolidarity]

[ 📹 Scenes of the massive devastation wrought on Khan Yunis, a city in the southern Gaza Strip, following months of Israeli bombardment, in addition to an invasion by the Israeli occupation forces (IOF), and their eventual withdrawal from the city. 📈 The death toll continues to rise in the Gaza genocide, now with an official count of over 34'262 Palestinians killed, while another 77'229 have been wounded over the previous six months.]

🇮🇱⚔️🇵🇸 🚀🏘️💥🚑 🚨

MASSIVE BOMBING IN GAZA CAUSES MASS DISPLACEMENT, SOUTH AFRICA DEMANDS INVESTIGATION INTO MASS GRAVES ON 201ST DAY OF GENOCIDE

On the 201st day of "Israel's" ongoing special genocide operation in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli occupation forces (IOF) committed a total of six new massacres of Palestinian families, resulting in the deaths of no less than 79 Palestinians, mostly women and children, while another 86 others were wounded over the previous 24-hours.

Gaza's Ministry of Health added that ambulance and paramedic crews are still unable to reach many of the victims of the Israeli occupation's bombing and shelling, with many bodies remaining trapped under the rubble or strewn across Gaza's streets.

Following the discovery of hundreds of decomposing corpses of Palestinian civilians at the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Yunis over the last several days, the South African Department of International Relations and Cooperation (SADIRC) called for "comprehensive investigations to ensure justice and accountability."

“Israel continues to disregard the rulings by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and UN resolutions unabated amid the unrelenting bombardment of Gaza, particularly the ICJ’s ruling which granted South Africa’s urgent request of March 6 for further provisional measures to prevent Israel from causing irreparable harm to the rights invoked by South Africa under the 1948 Genocide Convention in respect of the ongoing siege of Gaza,” the department said in a statement on Wednesday.

The department lombasted the Israeli occupation's failure to comply with orders given by the International Court of Justice at The Hague (ICJ), in the Netherlands, where South Africa accused the Zionist entity of "acts of genocide," leading the ICJ to order provisional measures to ensure Palestinian's right to life, basic healthcare services, and basic needs like food and potable water.

South Africa said the lack of accountability for the Israeli occupation has become increasingly clear, pointing to comments made by the United Nations Special Rapporteur that "Israel's" war on the "right to health" of Palestinians has resulted in the obliteration of Gaza's healthcare system.

“We further concur with the UN’s special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, when she recently highlighted the continuation of Israel's impunity and exceptionalism is no longer viable, especially in light of the binding UN Security Council resolution 2728 which called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza."

“In this respect, we call on the international community to act to bring the perpetrators to justice and ensure accountability for the victims and their families," the department added.

On top of South Africa's demands for an International investigation into the Nasser hospital massacre, the United Nations Human Rights High-Commissioner, Volker Türk, also called for an independent investigation into reports mass graves found at Nasser and Al-Shifa Hospitals, saying there needs to be "independent, effective and transparent investigations into the deaths."

"Given the prevailing climate of impunity, this should include international investigators," Türk said, adding that "hospitals are entitled to very special protection under International humanitarian law. And the intentional killing of civilians, detainees and others who are hors de combat is a war crime."

In other news, the German Foreign and Development ministries issued a joint statement on Wednesday in which they stated that Germany intended to resume funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine, more commonly known as UNRWA.

Previously, authorities with the Israeli occupation accused the aid organization of employing Palestinians with connections to Hamas and the Resistance's deadly attacks on illegal Israeli settlements and military bases lining the Gaza Strip on October 7th, 2023.

"The German government has dealt intensively with the allegations made by Israel against UNRWA and has been in close contact with the Israeli government, the United Nations and other international donors," the two departments said in their statement.

The German government said their concern stems from the fact that other International aid organizations were dependent on "UNRWA's operational structures" in Gaza, adding that ensuring humanitarian aid reached the enclave was "more important than ever" given the current situation.

The German government also urged UNRWA to implement recommendations made in a report following a German investigation into the claims which identified "neutrality issues" at the aid organization.

"In support of these reforms, the German government will soon continue its cooperation with UNRWA in Gaza, as Australia, Canada, Sweden and Japan, among others, have already done so," the joint statement added.

While the international community called for investigations into mass graves and renewed funding for UNRWA, the Hebrew media published reports stating that authorities with the Israeli occupation forces (IOF) have conducted all the necessary preparations for an invasion of Rafah, claiming they were ready to launch the operation at a moment's notice upon the occupation government's approval.

The occupation army added that it would begin ground operations in Rafah "very soon," starting with the evacuation of over 1.4 million Palestinians packed into the city, having been displaced by the occupation's genocide from various sectors of the Gaza Strip.

A report in the Hebrew media said the plan would begin by forcing over a million Palestinians to evacuate over the next four to five weeks, herded into tent complexes that they claim have been erected by "International aid organizations," a plan the Israeli occupation says it presented to its allies and other agencies in the region.

Subsequently, the plan will move forward in several stages, based on a "regional division" into defined areas, where at each stage, the Israeli occupation army will "inform the local population" before making advances, giving the Palestinian population a chance to evacuate.

The IOF also announced on Wednesday the recruitment of two reserve brigades to "continue the defense and attack mission in the Gaza Strip under the command of Division 99."

According to a report on the occupation's plans, the 2nd Reserve Brigade of the 146th Division, along with the 679th Reserve Brigade belonging to the 210th Division, will be transferred from the north of the occupied Palestinian territories, near the border with Lebanon, to the Gaza Strip.

Meanwhile, the slaughter in the Gaza Strip continues to escalate, with a deadly renewal of the occupation army's bombardment on the northern Gaza Strip, in addition to various sectors of the enclave.

Occupation Forces demanded that residents of Beit Lahiya, a town in the northern Gaza Strip, leave their homes and migrate towards Gaza City and the Jabalia Refugee Camp, where six months of intense bombardment has left both the ancient city and refugee camp in ruins, beginning a whole new exodus of displaced Palestinian families.

Around 50'000 Palestinians had just returned to their damaged homes, hoping to rebuild, only to be told a short time later that they would have to evacuate once again, under threat of Israeli slaughter and bombardment.

At the same time, Zionist warplanes launched a series of firebelts on Beit Lahiya, demolishing large numbers of civilian homes, as well as a mosque, killing at least three civilians and wounding many others, while occupation artillery shelling concentrated on the town of Beit Hanoun, also in Gaza's far north.

Additionally, occupation fighter jets bombed a residential home belonging to the Dardouna family in the Al-Salam area, east of Jabalia, while yet another bombing of the Shteiwi family home in the Al-Zaytoun neighborhood, southeast of Gaza City, resulted in the deaths of two Palestinians and also wounded a large number of civilians.

Several civilians were also wounded following a strike on the Al-Shujaiya neighborhood of Gaza City, when an IOF reconnaissance aircraft fired a missile which fragmented upon its explosion, hitting a number of Palestinians who were on the ground at the time.

Occupation warplanes also demolished the Al-Raed Tower in a firebelt on Al-Jalaa Street on Tuesday night.

The Zionist bombardment also hammered the central Gaza Strip overnight, with an occupation airstrike targeting a gathering of civilians near the Hyper Mall in the Nuseirat Refugee Camp, resulting in the deaths of four Palestinians, while yet another strike targeted agricultural land in the Trans Al-Baba area of Al-Zawaida.

Occupation artillery forces also shelled the eastern neighborhoods of the Al-Bureij Refugee Camp, while another air raid targeted the vicinity of the Al-Salhi Towers in the New Camp, north of Al-Nuseirat. Similarly, two more additional raids targeted the Wadi Gaza area.

In Khan Yunis, Civil Defense crews continued to recover the bodies of those killed and dumped into mass graves by the IOF at the Nasser Medical Complex, announcing on Wednesday morning the discovery of 51 additional bodies of various ages and categories, 30 of whom had been identified, while the rest remain unknown.

This brings the total number of bodies discovered at the Nasser complex to 324, while 9 more bodies were recovered from various areas of Khan Yunis.

In the meantime, occupation forces bombed a residential building belonging to the Al-Bahasba family east of Rafah City, in the southern Gaza Strip, killing at least three civilians, including a father and his two sons.

As a result of "Israel's" ongoing special genocide operation in the Gaza Strip, the death toll among the population of Gaza has now risen to exceed 34'262 Palestinians killed, including over 14'690 children and 9'680 women, while another 77'229 others have been wounded since the start of the current round of Zionist aggression, beginning with the events of October 7th, 2023.

April 24th, 2024

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@WorkerSolidarityNews

#gaza #gaza strip #gaza news #gaza massacre #war in gaza #genocide in gaza #genocide #israeli genocide #israeli war crimes #war crimes #crimes against humanity #israel #israeli occupation forces #israeli occupation #palestine #palestine news #free palestine #palestinians #end the occupation #israel palestine conflict #war #middle east #politics #news #geopolitics #world news #global news #international news #breaking news #current events

[reasonsforhope]

Odd jobs are few and far between in Nearobo. Peter knows because every day he walks the streets of his village in south-east Liberia looking for one. In a good month, he might make $20 (£16.70). That’s hardly enough to feed himself, let alone his children.

But today things are looking up. As part of an innovative new donation scheme, Peter receives $40 (£33.40) per month for a minimum of three years. No paperwork. No requests for receipts. No catch of any kind, in fact. Just hard cash transferred straight to his mobile phone. 

The 59-year-old casual labourer plans to use the money to buy materials for a new home for himself and his family, he says. “Although it is going to take long, I will continue until my house is completed.”

The scheme is part of a new-look approach to development assistance that, if taken to scale, could potentially turn the £156bn international aid industry on its head.

At least, so says Rory Stewart, the former UK foreign secretary turned podcaster-in-chief (he co-hosts ‘The Rest is Politics’ with Alastair Campbell, a surprise hit which has topped the Apple podcast charts virtually every week since it launched a year ago). From his new base in Amman, Jordan, Stewart heads up GiveDirectly – the world’s fastest growing nonproft – who are behind the initiative.

“It’s a rather radical, simple idea to help people out of extreme poverty. We deliver the cash directly … there’s no middleman and no government getting in the way.”

It feels like an odd statement from someone who has spent much of his life in government service: first as a junior diplomat for eight years (during which he penned a bestselling book about dodging Taliban bullets and hungry wolves whilst walking across Afghanistan), followed by almost a decade as a politician at Westminster.

Pictured: Rory Stewart and GiveDirectly’s Ivan Ntwali talk with a refugee household in Rwanda. Image: GiveDirectly

His enthusiasm is even more surprising given his initial caution. During his various ministerial stints at the UK’s department for international development (including three months as secretary of state), he was an out-and-out “cash sceptic.” 

Giving away money with no strings attached was, he felt at the time, an impossible sell to tax-paying voters. What’s stopping recipients spending it down the pub? Or investing in a hair-brained business venture? 

Quite a lot it turns out. No one knows the value of money more than those who don’t have any, he argues. Give an impoverished mother-of-four $40 (£33.40) cash and, 99 times out of 100, she’ll spend it on something useful: repairs to the house, say, or school fees for her kids...

By virtue of GiveDirectly’s model, participants can spend their money on whatever they choose, but the charity’s research indicates that most goes towards food, medical and education expenses, durables, home improvement and social events.

On the flipside, Stewart also has numerous examples of well-funded aid projects that deliver next to nothing. A decade ago, the then United Nations general secretary Ban Ki-moon estimated that 30 per cent of aid money disappears in corruption. There is little to suggest much has changed.

The aid industry doesn’t need corrupt officials to see its funds evaporate, however; it has its own voluminous bureaucracy. Stewart recalls once visiting a $40,000 (£33,560) water and sanitation project in a school in an unnamed African country. The ‘deliverables’ were two brick latrines and five red buckets for storing water...

The beauty of direct giving, he stresses, is not just that it annuls opportunities for thievery and red tape; it also frees the world’s poorest individuals from the well-meaning but, very often, misplaced guidance of donors. An aid expert in Brussels or Washington DC may well have a PhD in development economics, but who is best to judge what a single mother in a Kinshasa slum needs most and how to obtain it most cheaply: the expert with her degree, or the mother with her hungry children?

Empowering recipients to decide for themselves helps end the kind of “mad world” where aid agencies pay to ship wheat from Idaho, US, to Antananarivo, Madagascar, only for local people to sell it in order to buy what they really want, Stewart reasons.

“So often, these communities are having to turn the goods we send them into cash anyway, but just in a very inefficient and wasteful fashion … instead [with direct cash transfers] they are given the choice and freedom in how to spend it.” 

Pictured: Villagers in Kilif, Kenya, at a public meeting about the GiveDirectly programme. Image: GiveDirectly

Is the system perfect? No, clearly not. Stewart concedes that opportunities for fraud and coercion exist. To minimise these risks, GiveDirectly employs field officers to meet face-to-face with recipients, as well as a team of telephone handlers and internal auditors to follow up on reports of irregularity.

By his reckoning, however, the biggest impediment to direct giving really taking off is donor reticence. At present, only 2 per cent of official aid is given direct in cash. Stewart thinks it should be closer to 60 or 70 per cent...

‘My children will not have to beg anymore’

Happiness Kadzmila from Malawi enrolled on GiveDirectly’s Basic Income project last summer. She will now receive $50 (£41) a month for a year ($600/£496 in total).

What are the biggest hardships you’ve faced in life?

I am a divorced mother of four children. I got divorced in 2020 while I was eight months pregnant with my last-born child. Since then, I have been depending on working on other people’s farms. I get paid $0.49 (£0.43), or a plate of maize flour per day. As a result, it has been a challenge to feed my children, buy clothes for them, and to pay their school fees My firstborn child is in year 4, the school charges $0.69 (£0.61) per day for her. My second is in year 3, I pay $0.49 (£0.43) for him. There were days when I would have no food in my home, and my children would go to my neighbours’ homes to beg for food. This made me feel sorry for my children as a mother.

What does receiving this money mean for you?

I was so happy the day I received cash amounting to $51.75 (£43.56) from GiveDirectly. I used the money to buy maize at $9.88 (£8.32). My children will not have to go to our neighbours to beg for food anymore. I also bought a sheep at $34.58 (£29.10). I will be selling sheep in future when they multiply. I also bought lotion and soap at $1.88 (£1.58).

How will you spend your future payments?

I plan to renovate my house. I have always admired those who sleep in houses made of a roof with iron sheets because they do not have to think of fetching grass every year for a new roof. I will also start a business selling doughnuts to sustain my income after I receive my last transfer. I did not know that an organisation like GiveDirectly would come to help me this way All I can say to those who are giving us this money is ‘thank you’."

-via Positive News, 3/3/23

More and More People to Help

In addition to their universal basic income programs, GiveDirectly also has dedicated programs where you can donate to emergency disaster relief, people living under the protracted civil war and human rights disaster in Yemen, refugees, and survivors of the Syria-Turkey earthquake.

They have also commissioned a number of large-scale, third-party studies on the effectiveness of their numerous universal basic income models. Find these and other projects here.

#charity #donations #foreign aid #extreme poverty #poverty #economic inequality #africa #yemen #syria #turkey #malawi #kenya #rwanda #refugees #refugee crisis #givedirectly #universal basic income #good news #hope

[theculturedmarxist]

As with the South African case, according to court procedure the Israeli case was introduced on Friday by their “agent”, permanently accredited to the court, Tal Becker of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He opened with the standard formula “it is an honour to appear before you again on behalf of the state of Israel”, managing to imply purely through phrasing and tone of voice that the honour lay in representing Israel, not in appearing before the judges.

Becker opened by going straight to the Holocaust, saying that nobody knew more than Israel why the Genocide Convention existed. Six million Jewish people had been killed. The Convention was not to be used to cover the normal brutality of war.

The South African case aimed at the delegitimisation of the state of Israel, he said. On Oct. 7 Hamas had committed massacre, mutilation, rape and abduction. 1,200 had been killed and 5,500 maimed. He related several hideous individual atrocity stories and played a recording he stated to be a Hamas fighter boasting on WhatsApp to his parents about committing mass murder, rape and mutilation.

The only genocide in this case was being committed against Israel. Hamas continued to attack Israel, and for the court to take provisional measures would be to deny Israel the right to self-defence.

Provisional measures should rather be taken against South Africa and its attempt by legal means to further genocide by its relationship with Hamas. Gaza was not under occupation: Israel had left it with great potential to be a political and economic success. Instead Hamas had chosen to make it a terrorist base.

Hamas was embedded in the civilian population and therefore responsible for the civilian deaths. Hamas had tunnels under schools, hospitals, mosques and U.N. facilities and tunnel entrances within them. It commandeered medical vehicles for military use.

South Africa had talked of civilian buildings destroyed, but did not tell you they had been destroyed by Hamas booby traps and Hamas missile misfires.

The casualty figures South Africa gave were from Hamas sources and not reliable. They did not say how many were fighters? How many of the children were child soldiers? The application by South Africa was ill-founded and ill-motivated. It was a libel.

This certainly was a hardline and uncompromising start. The judges appeared to be paying very close attention when he opened with the Oct. 7 self-defence argument, but very definitely some of them started to fidget and become uncomfortable when he talked of Hamas operating from ambulances and U.N. facilities. In short, he went too far and I believe he lost his audience at that point.

Next up was Professor Malcolm Shaw KC. Shaw is regarded as an authority on the procedure of international law and is editor of the standard tome on the subject. This is an interesting facet of the legal profession, where standard reference books on particular topics are regularly updated to include key extracts from recent judges, and passages added or amended to explain the impact of these judgments. Being an editor in this field provides a route to prominence for the plodding and pedantic.

I had come across Shaw in his capacity as a co-founder of the Centre for Human Rights at Essex University. I had given a couple of talks there some twenty years ago on the attacks on human rights of the “War on Terror” and my own whistleblower experience over torture and extraordinary rendition. For an alleged human rights expert, Shaw seemed extraordinarily prone to support the national security interests of the state over individual liberty.

I do not pretend I gave it a great deal of thought. I did not know at that time of Shaw’s commitment as an extreme Zionist and in particular his long term interest in suppressing the rights of the Palestinian people.

After 139 states have recognised Palestine as a state, Shaw led for Israel the legal opposition to Palestine’s membership of international institutions, including the International Criminal Court. Shaw’s rather uninspired reliance on the Montevideo Convention of 1933 is hardly a legal tour de force, and it didn’t work.

Every criminal deserves a defence, and nobody should hold it against a barrister that they defend a murderer or rapist, as it is important that guilt or innocence is tested by a court. But I think it is fair to state that defence lawyers do not in general defend those accused of murder because they agree with murder and want a murderer to go on murdering.

That however is the case here: Malcolm Shaw speaks for Israel because he actually wants Israel to be able to continue killing Palestinian women and children to improve the security of Israel, in his view.

That is the difference between this and other cases, including at the ICJ. Generally the lead lawyers would happily swap sides, if the other side had hired them first. But this is entirely different.

Here the lawyers (with the possible exception of Christopher Straker KC, an other attorney who represented Israel on Friday) believe profoundly in the case they are supporting and would never appear for the other side. That is just one more way that this is such an extraordinary case, with so much drama and such vital consequences, not least for the future of international law.

For the reason I have just explained, Shaw’s role here is not that of a simple barrister plying his trade. His attempt to extend the killing should see him viewed as a pariah by decent people everywhere, for the rest of his doubtless highly-paid existence.

Shaw opened up by saying that the South African case continually spoke of context. They talked of the 75 years of the existence of the state of Israel. Why stop there? Why not go back to the Balfour Declaration or the British Mandate over Palestine?

No, the context of these events was the massacre of Oct. 7, and Israel’s subsequent right of self-defence. He produced and read a long quote from mid-October by European Commission President Ursula von Der Leyen, stating that Israel had suffered a terrorist atrocity and had the right of self-defence.

The truth is that this is not genocide but armed conflict, which state has existed since Oct. 7, he said. That was brutal, and urban warfare always involved terrible civilian casualties, but it was not genocide.

He then turned to the question of genocide. He argued that South Africa could not bring this case and the ICJ had no jurisdiction, because there was no dispute between Israel and South Africa on which the ICJ could rule, at the time the case was filed.

South Africa had communicated its views to Israel, but Israel had given no substantial reply. Therefore a dispute did not yet exist at time of filing. A dispute must involve interaction between parties and the argument had been on one side only.

This very much interested the judges. As I noted on day one, this got them more active than anything else when Professor John Dugard addressed the same point for South Africa. As I reported:

“The judges particularly enjoyed Dugard’s points, enthusiastically rustling through documents and underlining things. Dealing with thousands of dead children was a bit difficult for them, but give them a nice jurisdictional point and they were in their element.”

They were even more excited when Shaw tackled the same point. This gave them a way out! The case could be technically invalid, and then they would neither have to upset the major Western powers nor make fools of themselves by pretending that a genocide the whole world had seen was not happening. For a while, they looked visibly relieved.

Shaw should have given up while he was ahead, but he ploughed on for an hour, with some relief when he continually muddled his notes. A senior KC with zero ability to extemporise and recover was an interesting sight, as he kept stopping and shuffling paper.

Shaw argued that the bar for judging whether South Africa had a prima facie case must be significantly higher because of the high military and political cost to Israel if the court adopted provisional measures.

It was also necessary to show genocidal intent even at this stage. Otherwise the genocide was a “car without an engine”. If any illegal actions had taken place within Israel’s carefully targeted military action, Israel’s own military courts would investigate and act on them.

Random Israeli ministers and officials making emotional statements was not important. Official policy to protect civilians would be found in the minutes of the Israeli war cabinet and national security council. Israel’s strenuous attempts to move civilians out of harm’s way was an accepted measure in international human law and should not be viewed as mass displacement.

It was South Africa which was guilty of complicity in genocide in cooperation with Hamas. South Africa’s allegations against Israel “verge on the outrageous”.

Israel’s next lawyer was a lady called Galit Raguan from the Israeli Ministry of Justice. She said the reality on the ground was that Israel had done everything possible to minimise civilian deaths and to aid humanitarian relief. Urban warfare always resulted in civilian deaths. It was Hamas who were responsible for destruction of buildings and infrastructure.

There was overwhelming evidence of Hamas’ military use of hospitals. In every single hospital in Gaza the IDF had evidence of military use by Hamas. Mass evacuation of civilians was a humanitarian and legal measure. Israel had supplied food, water and medicine into Gaza but supplies had come under Hamas fire. Hamas steals the aid for its fighters.

Next up was lawyer Omri Sender. He stated that more food trucks per day now entered Gaza than before Oct. 7. The number had increased from 70 food trucks to 109 food trucks per day. Fuel, gas and electricity were all being supplied and Israel had repaired the sewage systems.

At this stage Israel had again lost the judges. One or two were looking at this man in a highly quizzical manner. A couple had definitely fallen asleep – there are only so many lies you can absorb, I suppose. Nobody was making notes about this guff.

The judges may find a way not to condemn Israel, but could not be expected to go along with this extraordinary nonsense. Sender continued that the scope and intensity of the fighting was now decreasing as the operation entered a new phase.

Perhaps noting that nobody believed him, Sender stated that the court could not institute provisional measures but rather was obliged to accept the word of Israel on its good intentions because of the Law of the Unilateral Declarations of States.

Now I have to confess that was a bit of international law I did not know existed. But it does, specifically in relation to ICJ proceedings. On first reading, it makes a unilateral declaration of intent to the ICJ binding on the state that makes it.

I cannot see that it forces the ICJ to accept it as sufficient or to believe in its sincerity. It seems rather a reach, and I wondered if Israel was running out of things to say.

That appeared to be true, because the next speaker, Christopher Straker, now took the floor and just ran through all the same Hamas stuff yet again, only with added theatrical indignation. Straker is the lawyer I suspect would happily have appeared for either side, because he was plainly just acting anyway. And not very well.

Straker said that it was astounding this case could be brought. It was intended to stop Israel from defending itself while Israel would still be subject to Hamas attacks. Hamas has said it will continue attacks.

If you look at the operation as a whole including relief efforts, it was plain there was no genocidal intent. Israel was in incredible danger. The proposed provisional measures were out of proportion to their effect.

Can you imagine if in the Second World War, a court had ordered the Allies to stop fighting because of civilian deaths, and allowed the Axis powers to keep on killing?

The final speaker was Gilad Noam, Israel’s deputy attorney-general. He said that the bulk of the proposed provisional measures should be refused because they exposed Israel to further Hamas attack. Three more should be refused because they referred to Palestine outside Gaza.

There was no genocidal intent in Israel. Ministerial and official statements made in the heat of the moment were rather examples of the tradition of democracy and freedom of speech. Prosecutions for incitement to genocide were under consideration.

The court must not conflate genocide and self-defence. The South African case devalues genocide and encourages terrorism. The Holocaust illustrated why Israel was always under existential threat. It was Hamas who were committing genocide.

And that was it. Israel had in the end not been allowed to show its contentious atrocity video, and it felt like their presentation had become repetitive and was padded to fill the time.

It is important to realise this. Israel is hoping to win on their procedural points about existence of dispute, unilateral assurances and jurisdiction. The obvious nonsense they spoke about the damage to homes and infrastructure being caused by Hamas, trucks entering Gaza and casualty figures, was not serious. They did not expect the judges to believe any of this. The procedural points were for the court. The rest was mass propaganda for the media.

In the U.K., the BBC and Sky both ran almost all the Israeli case live, having not run any of the South African case live. I believe something similar was true in the USA, Australia and Germany too.

While the court was in session, Germany has announced it will intervene in the substantial case to support Israel. They argue explicitly that, as the world’s greatest perpetrator of genocide, they are uniquely placed to judge. It is in effect a copyright claim. They are protecting Germany’s intellectual property in the art of genocide. Perhaps they might in future license genocide, or allow Israel to continue genocide on a franchise basis.

I am sure the judges want to get out of this and they may go for the procedural points. But there is a real problem with Israel’s “no dispute” argument. If accepted, it would mean that a country committing genocide can simply not reply to a challenge, and then legal action will not be possible because no reply means “no dispute”. I hope that absurdity is obvious to the judges. But they may of course wish not to notice it…

What do I think will happen? Some sort of “compromise”. The judges will issue provisional measures different to South Africa’s request, asking Israel to continue to take measures to protect the civilian population, or some such guff. Doubtless the State Department have drafted something like this for the president of the court, the American Joan Donoghue already.

I hope I am wrong. I would hate to give up on international law. One thing I do know for certain. These two days in The Hague were absolutely crucial for deciding if there is any meaning left in notions of international law and human rights.

I still believe action by the court could cause the U.S. and U.K. to back off and provide some measure of relief. For now, let us all pray or wish, each in our way, for the children of Gaza.

Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010. His coverage is entirely dependent on reader support. Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

#craig murray #the hague #international court of justice #israel #south africa #genocide #israel palestine conflict #gaza #consortium news

[kp777]

By Brett Wilkins

Common Dreams

Oct. 10, 2023

The leftist former Greek finance minister urged Europeans to "wake up and redeem ourselves" by working for the "destruction of the state of apartheid" against Palestinians.

Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis—who heads the leftist Democracy in Europe Movement 2025—on Tuesday blamed Europe for complicity in Israel's "crimes against humanity" in Palestine, while asserting that the only way to achieve peace is by ending Israeli apartheid against Palestinians.

"Those who try very hard to extract from people like me... a condemnation of the attack by the Hamas guerrillas will never get it," Varoufakis toldred in an interview explaining why he refuses to denounce the surprise weekend infiltration attack by Gaza-based militants that killed at least 900 Israelis.

Varoufakis continued:

And they will never get it for a very simple reason. Those who care about humans without any discrimination; those who care equally about a Jew and an Arab, must ask themselves a very simple question: What exactly is their idea of a cessation of hostilities? That the Palestinians are going to lay down their arms and go back into the largest open-air prison in the world, where they are constantly suffocated by the apartheid state?

"Any human being living under apartheid at some point will either die a terrible silent death or rebel and take some innocent people with them," Varoufakis said.

Addressing European complicity in Israeli apartheid, Varoufakis asserted that "the criminals here are not Hamas. Not even the Israeli settlers who are killing Palestinians. The criminals are Europeans. Us."

"We have participated in this crime against humanity over the decades by keeping our mouths shut," he added. "As long as people are dying outside the reach of cameras, as long as it's Palstinians who die and not the occupiers."

Varoufakis urged Europe to "wake up and redeem ourselves" by working for the "destruction of the state of apartheid."

While Palestinians and international figures including former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, United Nations officials, and South African anti-apartheid activists have for decades called Israel's policies and practices in Palestine apartheid, major Western human rights organizations—including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Israeli groups Yesh Din and B'Tselem—have only recently begun to do so, as have a growing number of U.S. congressional Democrats.

So have prominent Israelis including former Attorney General Michael Ben-Yair, former Deputy Attorney General Yehudit Karp, and former ambassadors to South Africa Alon Liel and Ilan Baruch, as well as journalists, artists, veterans, and others.

Underscoring Varoufakis' remarks, Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) posted on social media that "only one thing can put a stop to the tragic cycle of violence suffered by innocent Palestians and Israelis: the end of the Europe-supported Israeli apartheid."

Varoufakis' commentary came as Israeli forces continued a massive retaliatory assault on Gaza by air, land, and sea, killing at least 830 Palestinians, including at least 140 children, while wounding more than 4,000 others. Israeli air and artillery strikes have hit civilian targets including apartment buildings, medical facilities and workers, schools, mosques, and the Jabalia refugee camp, Gaza's largest.

As was the case in previous Israeli attacks on Gaza, entire families have been killed. Speaking Tuesday, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson Daniel Hagari declared that "the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy."

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Monday announced a "complete siege" of Gaza, saying Israel would block food and fuel from entering the territory of 2.3 million people—half of them children—and cut off its water and electricity, actions experts say likely amount to war crimes.

Given the hundreds of Israelis killed, the high death tolls in previous IDF assaults on Gaza, and Israel's unofficial "hundred eyes for an eye" policy, many observers fear thousands of Palestinians could be killed in the coming days and weeks.

Far-right Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed that Israel will exact a "mighty vengeance" for the weekend attacks, while Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared that it is "time to be cruel" and parliamentarian Ariel Kallner has called for a "Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of '48," a reference to the ethnic cleansing of over 750,000 Arabs from Palestine during the founding of the modern state of Israel in 1947-48.

"I witnessed the wars of 2008, 2014, and 2021, but this is something unique in terms of the intensity... entire families have been killed," Nidal Hamdouna, a humanitarian worker with Norwegian-Danish group Church Aid, toldThe Guardian on Tuesday. "The concern is to what extent civilians are protected, but also how to find a safe place, even though there is no safe place to go to."

#israel #palestine #gaza #hamas #israeli apartheid #yanis varoufakis #europe #Nakba of '48

[coochiequeens]

“So women with access to emergency care are the ones that live,” she said. “Women that don’t, die.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/01/21/gaza-childbirth/

JERUSALEM — Walaa didn’t expect the birth of her fourth child to spark abject fear. But by the time her contractions started, the whole family was frantic.

There were no ambulances to be seen in the streets of Gaza’s Rafah City, she said, now so crammed with displaced families that there was barely any food left available for the 27-year-old.

When her uncle Wissam, a doctor, reached the tent where she had lived for weeks in the cold, he said, he could see they had run out of time. “I’m having the baby now,” she kept telling him. It was dark, and she was scared.

His cellphone flashlight was all they had to see by.

The humanitarian catastrophe caused by Israel’s three-month military campaign against Hamas in Gaza counts some 52,000 pregnant women among its greatest victims. As airstrikes push 1.9 million people into an ever-smaller corner of the besieged enclave, disease is spreading, famine is looming and levels of anemia are so high that the risk of postpartum hemorrhage has soared and breastfeeding is often impossible. Forty percent of pregnancies are high-risk, CARE international estimates.

Prenatal care is almost nonexistent — what remains of Gaza’s hospital network is on its knees, at 250 percent capacity and consumed with treating mass casualties from Israeli bombing. Far more women are giving birth outside of medical facilities — in displacement camps, even in the street — than inside them.

Damage to facilities and communications blackouts — the strip lost cellphone service for a week this month — have left Gaza’s health ministry unable to compilereliable data for infant or maternal mortality during the conflict. But doctors and aid groups say miscarriage and stillbirths have spiked.

“What we know about pregnancy-related complications is that it’s hard to prevent them in any setting, but the way that we save a woman and newborn’s life is we treat the complication quickly,” said Rondi Anderson, a midwifery specialist for the Project HOPE aid group.

“So women with access to emergency care are the ones that live,” she said. “Women that don’t, die.”

The only place that Wissam could find to deliver his terrified niece’s baby was a spot of cold earth between the tents. Aid workers hung bedsheets to give the woman a modicum of privacy. No one had been able to contact Walaa’s husband, and her mother was so scared that at times she had to look away. They cut the boy’s umbilical cord with an unsterilized scalpel and they filled tin cans with hot water to keep him warm. He weighed 7 pounds and Walaa named him Ramzy.

The family spoke on the condition that only their first names be used because they feared for their safety in the event that Israeli troops entered the town.

Baby Ramzy is 5 days old. (Loay Ayyoub for The Washington Post)

They fled their home in northern Gaza so abruptly that no one thought to grab clothes for the baby. This week, Ramzy was swaddled in a onesie outgrown by another child in the camp. He wailed as Walaa, still in pain from tearing during the birth, gingerly pulled herself upright.

The 16-year blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt after Hamas won control of Gaza had already made pregnancy and childbirth more difficult for expecting mothers. Before the current conflict, hospitals often lacked adequate equipment and training for neonatal staff, according to Medical Aid for Palestinians, and more than half of pregnant women were anemic.

Hamas fighters streamed out of the enclave on Oct. 7 to kill around 1,200 people in Israel and take another 240 hostage. Israel responded with a bombing campaign and ground war to eradicate Hamas, killing almost 25,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, to date.

The South African legal team that accused Israel before the International Court of Justice this month of committing genocide during the conflict argued that the obstruction of lifesaving treatment since Oct. 7 amounts to preventing births.

A lawyer for Israel called allegations that it is obstructing the delivery of food, water, fuel and other supplies critical for Gaza “tendentious and partial,” and said it was working “around-the-clock” to help scale up the volume of aid making it into the enclave.

Hanaa al-Shawa, 23, gave birth to her first child, Ayla, during the coronavirus pandemic, and the little girl, she said, brought her family a “glimmer of hope.” Shawa and her husband Mustafa, 25, were ecstatic when they learned in July that another child was on the way. The war began in October, and the future they dreamed of fell apart. “I had felt overwhelming joy,” Shawa recalled. “I did not realize that this joy would turn into great suffering.”

Nearly 20,000 babies were born in Gaza during the first 105 days of the war, UNICEF reported Friday. Delays in the delivery of lifesaving supplies, the U.N. children’s agency said, have left some hospitals performing Caesarean sections without anesthetic. Spokeswoman Tess Ingram said she met a nurse at Gaza’s Emirati maternity hospital who had helped with postmortem caesarians on six dead women.

“Seeing newborn babies suffer while some mothers bleed to death should keep us all awake at night,” Ingram told reporters Friday. “In the time it has taken to present this to you, another baby was likely born, but into what?”

“Becoming a mother should be a time of celebration,” she said. “But in Gaza it’s another child delivered into hell.”

For the five pregnant women interviewed by Washington Post reporters, fear that mother or baby might not survive suffused their waking thoughts — and made appearances in nightmares, too.

Shawa and Mustafa left their home in Gaza City’s Yarmouk Street in the second week of October. The Israel Defense Forces had ordered 1.1 million people in northern Gaza to move south for what it described as their own safety.

“I was afraid that I would miscarry because of the power of the rockets,” she said.

Displaced Palestinian families from the northern and central Gaza Strip evacuate toward southern Gaza on Oct. 13. (Loay Ayyoub for The Washington Post)

Many pregnant women made the 20-mile journey from north to south on foot, their legs swollen and joints heavy as they carried their luggage, three women who made the journey told The Post.

When Ayla was born, her family had a room full of toys ready for her. The room in which Shawa’s second child, a girl, will spend her first weeks, in a friend’s home in the Tel al-Sultan area, is tainted with asbestos, she said.

“We carried Ayla here in just the clothes she was wearing, and we don’t even have anything warm for her,” Shawa said. “If I’m unable to provide for her, what will I do for my next child?”

Rising food scarcity and malnutrition can cause potentially life-threatening complications during childbirth and lead to low birth weight, wasting, failure to thrive and developmental delays.

Shawa said she had only eaten tinned food, with no access to fruit or vegetables, since she left her home three months ago. Doctors have said her iron levels are low and her blood pressure is high. Mustafa searches daily but has found no suitable medication to control it.

Saja Al-Shaer, 19, started to feel like she was too young to become a mother. Her weight had dropped below 110 pounds, she was anemic, and her husband had not managed to get her medication, either. “He spent three days knocking on the doors of pharmacies,” she said. “I do not know if I will see this child or not.”

In late December, doctors at the al-Aqsa Hospital, 11 miles to the north, received a pregnant woman whose high blood pressure caused eclampsia and bleeding to her brain, according to Deborah Harrington, a British obstetrician who volunteered at the hospital with a Medical Aid for Palestinians team.

The baby was delivered by a C-section, Harrington said. The mother was still on life support when the physician left two weeks later.

“These women are presenting it in much more extreme condition,” Harrington said. “They’re just not getting hypertensive treatment. They’re not being screened for diabetes. If they’re diabetic, they’re not getting treatment for their diabetes.

“They know that actually accessing care, as it often is for women in conflict, is really difficult and fraught with danger. At night, there is often no light, so moving around is really difficult. You can’t call an ambulance because there’s no signal. The women I saw were really frightened.”

Walaa with her uncle Wissam, who helped deliver her newborn son. (Loay Ayyoub for The Washington Post)

From the corner of the damp room where Walaa was tending to Ramzy on Friday, she worried about where they would find clean water or baby formula. Her family had looked everywhere for diapers, but come up empty. In Tel al-Sultan, Shawa was fixating on rumors that Israel’s army would direct them to evacuate again. The walking, the carrying, the sense that nothing around her was hygienic — it all frightened her.

But she had made one decision that no shortage or military orders could change. She would name her daughter after her sister-in-law, killed in an Israeli airstrike weeks earlier while trying to find shelter for her own children.

The girl, she said, would be called Heba. In Arabic, it means blessing from God.

Mahfouz reported from Cairo and Harb reported from London. Loay Ayyoub in Rafah contributed to this report.

#Gaza #Maternal and infant care in gaza #Delivering babies with the light from cellphones #52000 pregnant women #40% of pregnancies in gaza are high risk #Hospitals in gaza are at 250% capacity #Medical Aid for Palestinians #Caesarean sections without anesthetic #postmortem caesarians in a desperate bid to save the baby

[wherelibertydwells]

The most popular host in US cable news history, Tucker Carlson has released the first episode of his new show since his April 24 firing from Fox News. The episode, which for now appears exclusively on Twitter, immediately went viral, having been seen by millions.

The reaction from the corporate media, which often struggle to attract a fraction of that audience, was as predictable as it was negative. CNN expressed that he "has given voice to some of the most extreme ideas in right-wing politics".

The Washington Post called him a "far-right pundit" whose monologue was "tinged with conspiratorial thinking and drenched in disdain by other media and political figures".

The Guardian claimed, without evidence, that the episode was "received with widespread derision" and seemed particularly upset that he "insulted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky".

However, if someone stops to see what he said, he will realize that the terms "left" and "right" have lost their meaning in US discourse, becoming just labels used to stigmatize dissidents.

Calling someone an "extreme right" no longer reveals almost anything about their convictions. Carlson's debut monologue focused almost entirely on the proxy war in Ukraine, waged by the US and NATO against Russia. The Ukrainian war effort is being armed and funded by the US and its Western allies and is the CIA's top priority.

Carlson opposed US involvement from the beginning. In his debut monologue on Twitter, he once again questioned the policy of fueling a war involving the US and Russia, owners of the largest nuclear stocks on the planet; expressed skepticism about Ukrainian claims that it was Russia that blew up the Kakhovka dam , citing numerous examples where Ukraine lied in similar situations, such as when it accused Russia of blowing up the pipeline itself or of being behind the drone strikes against the Kremlin; and recalled that the greatest advocates of this war are the same neoconservatives who falsely told the world that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

This stance of opposition to the US/NATO war puts Carlson on the same side as people like Noam Chomsky, an icon of the global left, from important sectors of left parties in Germany, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Italy; the African National Congress in South Africa; the president of Mexico, the leftist Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador; and, in Brazil, Lula.

If Carlson, therefore, is in agreement with much of the global left, how can he be characterized as an "extreme right" ? It is clear that this term had its meaning completely emptied, starting to be used against anyone who differs from the neoliberal consensus of the West in relation to wars, espionage, censorship and the economic guidelines of the so-called Washington Consensus.

By far what most marks Carlson's work over the last six years is the extreme skepticism, and sometimes disdain, with which he treats America's main institutions of power. Its most frequent targets have been the CIA, the FBI, the NSA (National Security Agency), the corporate media, big tech.

He waged a two-year crusade in favor of pardoning Julian Assange, whom he treats as a hero, in yet another point of convergence with Lula and the international left.

These perspectives, central to Carlson's worldview, are closely associated with the classical left. I felt so comfortable appearing on Carlson's Fox show because the targets of his fiercest criticism are precisely the intelligence agencies and neoliberal institutions that I have denounced in my journalistic career. Carlson's show was one of the few places on US television where this kind of opposition could be heard.

There are, of course, several disagreements between Carlson and most progressives. He is a vehement opponent of illegal immigration and the use of medication and surgery for trans minors, for example.

At the same time, progressive stars like Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez voted to authorize $40 billion to fuel the war in Ukraine and rarely, if ever, express skepticism about the claims of the CIA or the Pentagon.

Carlson is far from a leftist, but there is no world in which he and his core views can be defined as "extreme right", except a world in which that term is just a weaponized instrument to stigmatize dissent from established dogma.

Labeling someone the extreme right today is not about ideology, but only serves to coerce anyone who expresses skepticism about the policies of the US military-industrial complex.

Glenn Greenwald

[duckiemimi]

to preface this, in Audre Lorde's words: 

"the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." 

the ICJ is the judicial body of the UN and is essentially the legal limb of western hegemony. its conception of "justice" is selective and has failed the global south time and time again, so truly, liberation will be delivered by those in need of it; Palestinian freedom will ultimately be delivered by Palestinian resistance.

that being said, the recent provisional measures (click) are still a step forward in a long road ahead, a pebble in what we hope will be a landslide. an explicit, direct call for ceasefire would’ve been miles better than the lukewarm legal-worded ruling, but as the South African foreign minister has stated (click), by implication, what the ICJ has done is effectively issue an order for a ceasefire. to stop "israel" and its military from committing any more acts within the scope of genocide, to provide humanitarian aid and medical care, to implement the order in its entirety, a ceasefire must happen first. at best, this symbolic, historic win could open many doors, but time is of the essence.

we know by now that whatever the order, as long as it favors South Africa and the people of Palestine, "israel" would only choose to ignore it, as it has always done. the question now is whether it's western sponsors and those complicit will listen to their own mechanisms of international justice. will they play by the rules they've made, or is impunity also just a flimsy word to them?

of course, this is only an interim ruling, this isn't the final verdict. history was made this January, but this progress should not make us complacent. now that "israel" is being formally investigated for genocide, what we can do with this ruling is put even more pressure on our own governments to rethink their diplomacy in relation to "israel," call for a permanent ceasefire, and stop the genocide. there is still work to do, but this is a definite stepping stone towards freedom.

here is a great thread worth reading on this ruling (click).

#peace is not the answer; liberation is the answer #resources #icj #south africa #palestine #free palestine

[mogai-sunflowers]

MOGAI BHM- Day 10!

happy BHM! today i’m going to be talking about the harlem renaissance and its significance! the harlem renaissance itself is a huge topic to cover, so this post will be more of an overview, with discussions of art and theater during the movement, and in future posts i will go through literature and music during the harlem renaissance!

Background and Context-

[Image ID: A black-and-white photograph of a group of Black people organized into two lines in a field. At the front of the two lines, there is a table and a few white people administering medical tests/attention to the Black people in the lines. End ID.]

Part of what sparked the Harlem Renaissance was a series of factors that compounded each other in the early part of the 1900s in America. Urbanization was one of these factors, and it describes the process of populations shifting from rural to city/urban environments. Early 1900s America saw a huge increase in the production of metal, the drilling for oil, and other industrial factors, which led to a large amount of skyscrapers being built and cities being developed.

Urbanization is not just the building of cities, though. It’s the population, economic, and cultural shifts that come with the building of cities. The environments people live in influence their financial situation, their culture, their education, and their access to certain resources and opportunities.

When mass urbanization happens, it’s usually accompanied by mass migrations, which is exactly what happened with what is now called the Great Migration, which lasted about 6 decades starting in 1910. The earlier part of the Great Migration was characterized by a huge amount of Black southerners migrating to the rapidly urbanizing North.

The Great Migration of Black people out of the South also coincided with a growth of new, revolutionary ideas about race and culture. The horrible legacy of white supremacy in America had completely severed Black Americans from their individual cultures in Africa. It caused, and continues to cause to this day, a difficulty for Black people to connect to cultural and racial pride- but in the early 1900s, that began to change. 

A lot of Black people began striving to create racial pride out of the racial oppression they were experiencing- since many Black people didn’t know which culture they descended from, a movement to create the ‘New Negro’, as it was then called, out of a pan-African identity, began to grow. New, revolutionary ideas of what it meant to be Black in America- ideas rooted in pride and celebration rather than shame, took root as huge populations of Black people moved northward to growing cities.

In 1919, a series of deadly race riots, later known as ‘Red Summer’, combined with the renewed outrage many Black people had towards their inhumane treatment after experiencing much better treatment overseas at war, led to increased awareness of a racial reckoning in America, and the Harlem Renaissance was afoot.

The Harlem Renaissance-

[Image ID: A black-and-white photograph of a large crowd of Black people all standing in front of a theater. The theater has a glitzy, light-up sign that says “LAFAYETTE” and is strewn with a few signs that say “HALLELUJAH!”. End ID.]

Centered in the city of Harlem in New York, the Harlem Renaissance was a Black cultural revolution. It was a national rebirth of Black pride and it involved the birth and growth of Black literature, art, music, culture, and pride. 

Black music thrived through the international boom of jazz music. Black art and literature grew through publications like The Crisis and Opportunity. Black sociology thrived and defined the movement. 

The Harlem Renaissance influenced the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power movement, and all areas of Black culture, and it had and continues to have international influences.

Harlem buzzed with the opening of many new, ritzy clubs where people enjoyed vibrant performances, and Black night life became a staple of the Renaissance.

Visual Art During the Harlem Renaissance-

[Image ID: A colorful painting by Aaron Douglas. The background is vibrant streaks of golden, yellow, and orange, and the subject of the painting is a Black man in a brown suit, wearing a hat. End ID.]

Visual arts flourished during the Harlem Renaissance. Formal art education institutions were very hostile to Black people, so they very rarely could attend them, meaning that mainstream art movements ignored and excluded Black people, Black artists, and Black art. The Harlem Renaissance challenged that.

Often called the “Father of African-American Art”, the most famous visual artist of the Harlem Renaissance is Aaron Douglas. Influenced by movements like Cubism, Douglas had four of his works, a series which he called the “Aspects of N*gro Life”, commissioned. They became very popular for combining modern art styles with indigenous African styles mainly from West African countries, and they depicted Black people in different areas of life, especially music and other movements which flourished during the Harlem Renaissance.

Considered to be the first Pan-African-American artwork, a sculpture called ‘Ethiopia’ was created inspired by Egyptian culture by artist Meta Warrick Fuller, who made the art dedicated to the contributions of Black Americans to the world of art. Printmaking also flourished as an art form during the Harlem Renaissance with artists like James Lesesne Wells, whose style combined both European and African influences.

Photography helped sustain the Harlem Renaissance- historically, documentation of Black experiences had only been about pain and suffering- and while remembering those experiences is important, they are not the whole story. Famous photographer James Van Der Zee captured never-before-seen Black joy, Black pride, in his thousands of beautiful photographs of the Harlem Renaissance.

Theater During the Harlem Renaissance-

[Image ID: A small, blurry, black-and-white photograph of a large crowd of Black people standing and cheering outside of a theater called the Savoy Ballroom, which has a big, lit sign advertising its name and shows names of shows playing there beneath that sign. End ID.]

In media like plays and stage performances, Black identity had always been extremely limited- racist legacies of minstrel shows and racist stereotypes in performances meant that Black people were only ever portrayed in horribly demeaning roles, usually not even by Black actors, and when they WERE portrayed by Black actors, those actors were treated terribly and were forced to demean themselves in their performances.

The Harlem Renaissance began to challenge that by giving Black Americans the opportunity to represent themselves in their own stage performances- instead of the minstrel stereotypes they’d been reduced to for a long time, many began writing their own roles, allowing themselves to give depth and humanity to Black characters, allowing Black characters to be the good guys, allowing them the ability to have complex stories and lives outside of stereotypes.

Black Americans established such famous theaters as the Savoy Ballroom and the Apollo Theater, eventually becoming just south-adjacent of the white-dominated Broadway. Famous writers like Langston Hughes began writing plays like ‘Mulatto’ and ‘The Sun Do Move’, and famous Black actors like Billy King and Theophilus Lewis became stars.

One of the most influential stage works to come out of the Harlem Renaissance was a play called Shuffle Along, and it challenged the racist exclusion that many Black actors faced on Broadway by becoming the first Black play in over a decade to reach Broadway. It portrayed Black people living their lives and gave them the ability to express the humanity that white Americans were trying to ignore.

Sources-

https://magazine.artland.com/art-movement-harlem-renaissance/#:~:text=The%20Visual%20Arts%20of%20the%20Harlem%20Renaissance&text=Douglas%20was%20influenced%20by%20modernist,from%20Benin%2C%20Congo%20and%20Senegal. 

https://www.britannica.com/event/Harlem-Renaissance-American-literature-and-art/Visual-art

https://macaulay.cuny.edu/seminars/henken08/articles/r/e/n/Renaissance_and_Theatre_d0e4.html#:~:text=These%20performances%20were%20often%20shown,and%20The%20Sun%20Do%20Move.

https://historyoftheharlemrenaissance.weebly.com/the-apollo-theatre.html https://www.history.com/topics/roaring-twenties/harlem-renaissance

tagging @metalheadsforblacklivesmatter​ @neopronouns​ @genderkoolaid​ 

#mogai bhm #mogai #mogai community #bhm #black history month #blm #black lives matter

[rivercelt]

Not just a useless degree: the importance of the humanities and social sciences

I am Caitlin Sovana McGregor, a student of the Humanities. I am a third year Philosophy and History student at one of the best universities in Africa. In previous years, I have also taken English Literature, Politics, International Relations, and Sociology. As you have probably deduced by my subject choices, I am extremely passionate about the field of Humanities. I believe that it is the single most important, yet sadly overlooked sphere of academia, and even life in general. 

This is what I will be dedicating my entire page to. It pains me to see how neglected and mocked my field is, and I plan to educate as many people as possible on the importance and growing relevance of the social sciences and humanities.

For those of you who don’t know, the humanities is a field of study that, according to Encyclopædia Britannica, is concerned with humans, societies, cultures, and their thinking, values, knowledge, evolution, creations, and histories. To put it more simply, the field studies, well, humanity. Some disciplines within the humanities are: history, art, literature, philosophy, sociology, politics, anthropology, psychology, etc. Even disciplines such as law and economics fall within the scope of the humanities and social sciences. 

Unfortunately, with the rise of anti-intellectualism, and the capitalistic desire to do everything only in pursuit of profit, the humanities and social sciences have been very lowly regarded as a field of study. You might have heard STEM, finance, or business students say things like “what job can you even do with a degree in the humanities?”, or “what are you going to do with a Bachelor of Arts, work at McDonald’s?”, or my personal favourite, “can’t you just Google the things you learn in your degree?”. 

I strongly and fully believe that the humanities and social sciences are just as, if not more important than any other fields of study. Engineers design the physical aspects of the world for us to live in it more efficiently, medical doctors provide the solutions and preventions to injuries, diseases, and illnesses that would threaten our personal and collective development, lawmakers and lawyers design and maintain the structural aspects of society, scientists provide breakthroughs that could alter ways of life for the better, information technicians and technologists innovate and create methods for better communication and access to information. These are all important careers and aspects of life, but what do they all have in common? What is the golden thread tying all these very important spheres together? Humanity. Humans. Society. The very existence of people is both why and how these fields of study exist in the first place. Society is at the core of our human experience. So why wouldn’t the study thereof be important?

We need political and sociological thinkers to help us understand the complex powers and structures that shape society and our individual lives, the impacts of the relationships between individuals, groups, and institutions, and the extent to which change is possible on these levels. We need historians to analyse the structures, systems, individuals, and societies of the past in order to understand the social, political, and economic environments we are faced with today, and prevent the cycles of oppression from repeating themselves. This field is especially important in a country like mine, where cycles of oppression have repeated themselves over and over (colonisation and the brutality towards indigenous South Africans, followed by cruelty by the British towards Afrikaners, which later resulted in the oppression of non-Afrikaner South Africans by Afrikaner nationalists in the form of apartheid, followed by a long and complex continuation of oppression, even after the end of the regime). We need literary thinkers to explore the human pattern of storytelling, and how this practice can sometimes reveal more about humanity than a purely factual and explicit account of things. We need anthropologists to guide us through the evolution of societies and cultures, so that we may celebrate diversity and respect and understand our differences and similarities. We need philosophers to question literally everything, to relentlessly seek answers and knowledge, to study knowledge and the nature of reality itself, to teach us how to think critically, and to create a world of new minds that may begin to unravel and dismantle the rigidity of conservative thinking, one debate at a time.

Not surprisingly, most people who hold the humanities in disdain have fallen into the capitalist trap of seeking a return on investment after their studies. People like this fail to recognise that a return on investment doesn’t always have to come in monetary form. Personally, I do not plan to live a lavish life after becoming a teacher, professor, or researcher in my department. And the greatest return on investment for me, would be to know that my work, which I have dedicated my life to, has had an impact on society, no matter how great or small. A return on investment for me would be knowing that, at the end of the day, I have imparted my knowledge onto a younger generation of our country, and that I’ve helped mould them into citizens who understand the complexities of life, and who can think critically, and understand themselves and each other. A return on investment for me would be knowing that I have encouraged someone to speak up about the injustices they see, and that under my tutorship, they are able to view these issues on a level deeper than most. A return on investment for me would be to see more and more students fall in love with the pursuit of knowledge. After all, the pursuit of knowledge is the only thing worth living for.

#humanities #humanities student #philosophy student #philosophy #sociology student #anthropology

[wellesleyunderground]

Honoring a Trailblazer: Dr. Harriet Rice, Class of 1887, the first African American woman to graduate from Wellesley

Cleo Hereford ’09

As presented by Hereford during the Wellesley Alumnae of African Descent Annual Meeting on Sunday, June 25, 2023.

____

During this year’s annual meeting, we wanted to highlight a true trailblazer - Dr. Harriet Rice, the first African American woman to graduate from Wellesley College. Rice was born just one year after the Civil War ended in 1866 in Newport, Rhode Island to father George, a steward for the Newport Steamship Company and mother Lucinda. A talented student, Rice achieved the highest class ranking in Greek at Newport’s racially integrated Rogers High School. After graduating in 1882, she matriculated at Wellesley a year later and was one of only three black students. One can only imagine what it was like to be a black woman at Wellesley during the 1880s but College archives do provide some insight. In 1935, the Alumnae Association sent Dr. Rice a biographical sheet asking about physical or other handicap to which she responded “Yes! I’m colored which is worse than any crime in this God blessed Christian country!”

Nevertheless, she persisted.

After receiving her degree from Wellesley in 1887, Rice, following in her brother’s footsteps, earned a medical degree from the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children in 1891 at a time when few women pursued medicine. She then sought additional training while interning at the New England Hospital for Women and Children. Her advanced medical training is especially notable when one considers that up to 1904 only half of all medical graduates of any race or gender received postgraduate training making Dr. Rice a highly qualified physician.

As expected, given the post Reconstruction time period, black physicians faced rampant racism and discrimination often relegated to only working with black populations while female doctors, including white women, were often denied appointments at hospitals due to gender based discrimination. Rice was amongst only the second generation of black female physicians but also female physicians in general in the country. (For those interested, Rebecca Lee Crumpler was the first African American woman to become a formerly-trained physician receiving a medical degree in 1864). By 1896, there were just 115 Black female doctors in the country.

Despite this, she forged ahead determined to be a successful physician. Though largely prohibited from practicing medicine in any American hospital as an African American woman, she found a way to utilize her skills providing medical treatment and care to low income individuals at Hull House, an organization offering a variety of social services, on Chicago’s Near West Side. It was in Chicago where Rice worked alongside famous social worker, women’s suffrage leader and first American woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, Jane Addams. Much different than the Chicago we know today, however, only 1.3% of Chicago’s population in the 1890s was black and Rice faced discrimination, particularly from Hull House’s white European immigrant clientele (black residents were limited to residence on the South Side, far from Hull House). Further, working at the settlement house offered little in the way of financial compensation, upward mobility or recognition for Rice; at one point, she was listed as a secretary at the organization when she was in fact running the medical clinic. Rice sought other professional opportunities and, in 1897, she became the only doctor at the Chicago Maternity Hospital and Training School for Nursery Maids providing obstetric care.

After years working in the medical field in Chicago and later Boston, Dr. Rice opted to serve on the frontlines as a military physician for three years during World War I. Throughout the war, which lasted from 1914 through 1918, women of color contributed to the effort both as individuals and through organizations such as the YMCA. At the start of the war, Rice attempted to join the American Red Cross effort to provide medical services to American troops but was ultimately denied because of her race. Again, she persisted contacting the French government who leapt at the opportunity to have an experienced medical doctor available to treat French troops. Joining the effort at 49 years old, Rice served on hospital duty in France from January 1915 until just after Armistice in 1918, longer than most American troops. This period in Rice’s life finally afforded her the opportunity to both practice medicine and be recognized for her work, opportunities that had previously alluded her. As a result of American racism, she made important contributions to the Allied war effort, not under the American flag, but the French. In 1919, Rice was awarded the Medal of French Gratitude at the French Embassy in Washington, DC for outstanding service in French military hospitals treating wounded soldiers. The medal was specifically created to express gratitude by the French government to non-military participants who, in part, had performed an act of exceptional dedication in the presence of the enemy during the war. After returning home, Dr. Rice continued to work in medicine before retiring in West Somerville, MA.

Dr. Harriet Rice, Class of 1887, passed away in 1958 at age 92 in Worcester, MA and is buried in Newport, RI alongside her parents in the God’s Little Ace section of the Common Burying Ground. She is remembered as “a woman of valor.”

Sources:

Dr. Harriet Rice, Class of 1887 (Davis Museum)

A Woman of Valor

American Women Physicians in WWI

History Bytes: Dr. Harriet Alleyne Rice

Who was Harriet Rice? (Jane Addams Hull-House Museum)

Dr. Harriet Rice: First Black Resident at Hull House

#Wellesley Trailblazers #Harriet Rice #WAAD

[dbs-superleggera]

Greetings Bernard Arnault,

Charmed Circle Services

If you refer to a group of people as a charmed circle, you mean that they seem to have special power or influence, and do not allow anyone else to join their group.

A protection racket is a type of racket and a scheme of organized crime perpetrated by a potentially hazardous organized crime group that generally guarantees protection outside the sanction of the law to another entity or individual from violence, robbery, ransacking, arson, vandalism, and other such threats, in exchange for payments. 

Green Crime is illegal activity that involves the environment, biodiversity, or natural resources. There are generally five types of major environmental crime: illegal logging, fishing, and mining, and crimes that harm wildlife and generate pollution.

State-corporate crime is a concept in criminology for crimes that result from the relationship between the policies of the state and the policies and practices of commercial corporations.

Tax Haven Lobbying

State-corporate crime is a concept in criminology for crimes that result from the relationship between the policies of the state and the policies and practices of commercial corporations. 

Organized transnational crime is organized criminal activity that takes place across national jurisdictions, and with advances in transportation and information technology, law enforcement officials and policymakers have needed to respond to this form of crime on a global scale. 

Government Joint Venture 

Example: Government Part Owned Coal & Diamond Mines

international corporation that specializes in coal & diamond mining, coal & diamond exploitation, coal & diamond retail, diamond trading and industrial coal & diamond manufacturing sectors.

Example: Debswana Diamond Company Limited Influenced

Debswana is a joint venture between the government of Botswana and the South African diamond company De Beers; each party owns 50 percent of the company

Ecological Preservation Company

Farmland Real Estate

Acquisition 

Lease

Gross Margin

China Big Four Influence: Industrial and Commercial Banks, Construction Bank, & Agriculture Banks (Ag Banks)

Products

Finance and insurance, consumer banking, corporate banking, investment banking, investment management, global wealth management, private equity, mortgages, credit cards

Gross Margin Loan

In exchange for farmland development or startup give cash for gross margin %

LVMH Digital Wallet

Air Miles Credit Card

Client Card (Gift Card/Social Club)

Drop Shipping

Isolated Investment Platform/Newsletter

Distributors Type

Wholesale distributors provide that liaison, buying large quantities of products from manufacturers, storing them and then supplying them to retailers and other businesses.

Distributors

Distributors have a business relationship with manufactures and have partial ownership of the product they sell. Some distributors buy exclusive rights to buy a company's product to ensure that they are the sole distributor of that product in the area. Distributors often sell to wholesalers and retailers, creating minimal contact with the final buyers.

Indirect selling

Indirect selling is when a company uses an intermediary to distribute and sell its product. Indirect selling marketing channels can use varying amounts of intermediaries. In the most direct distribution route, the manufacturer can sell their product to an intermediary who then sells the product to a consumer. However, they may sometimes involve more than one intermediary in the distribution of a product.

This marketing channel encompasses many of the examples of intermediary channel uses, including shopping malls and chain retailers.

LVMH Distribution & Cash Conversion Cycle

Big Pharma Distribution Model

Wholesalers purchase drugs from manufacturers and distribute to a variety of customers, including independent, chain, or mail-order pharmacies, hospitals, long-term care, and other medical facilities.

Wholesale Distribution Clients

Drop Shipping

Malls

Modeling Agencies

Wedding Directors

Private Schools

Social Club

Art Auctions

Film Production Companies

Car Dealerships/Shows (Collaboration)

Jewelers (Gift Card Distribution for Store Credit)

Political Cabinet

Tennis Clubs (Dress Code)

Dinner Hall Rental Companies

Hair Salons (Gift Card Distribution for Store Credit)

Investment Banks (Gift Card Distribution for Store Credit)

Wholesale Client Requirement

Retailer Fair with Retail Advisory Groups Collaboration Business Incubator

Business incubator is an organization that helps startup companies and individual entrepreneurs to develop their businesses by providing a fullscale range of services starting with management training and office space and ending with venture capital financing.

What Can Companies Do To Improve Cash Conversion Cycle Times?

Invest in Real-Time Analytics.

Encourage Earlier Payments.

Speed Up the Delivery Time.

Make It Easier To Pay.

Simplify Your Invoices.

Rental and Recruitment

Graduation and Wedding Rentals allows for customer experience turning dreamers into clients

Wearing LVMH for the first time at Graduation is Emotionally Symbolic

Celebrations release the feel-good chemicals oxytocin, dopamine, and endorphins, which lower the stress hormone cortisol. This doesn't mean you simply are in a better mood, though your mood will improve. It also means you'll have clarity of thought and feel more in control.

Oxytocin is known as a social bonding hormone, unfortunately, though, it can also be the trigger to addiction.

Golf & Tennis Endorsement

Endorsement Wear Contracts (Product Placement Scheme)

This Bridges the LVMH Brand and Logo to Future Athletes where Nike isn't that Popular compare to other Nike endorsed athletes

Golf and Tennis are posh so the endorsements fit LVMH target audience

Rugby Kit Sponsor

Secure South African Athletes and Create a Larger Presence in South Africa (Natural Resources)

Athleisure Wear

Big and Tall Athleisure Clothing

Minimum Net Worth Condos with Luxury Strip Malls

Gift Card Program Drop Shipping : Promotion Program, Have a grace period for gift card top up (treat like a prepaid rewards credit card); Curated accessories promotional codes. Cash is acquired without product sold. (Starbucks with a twist)

Trade Shows: Promotional Model, This type of model books jobs that help sell or promote a certain commodity. Promotional models are often found at trade shows and other live events. As a whole, these models must be personable, outgoing, and have a strong knowledge of the product they are representing.

LVMH Inclusive (Minimum Spending) Social Club: Cross-functional Collaboration Based Shopping

Project

Cross collaborate through divisions to create a specific project. Projects are a curation of a series of products from multiple divisions. Goal is to have people attached to projects, not products. View Projects as Different Personalities. (Harvard Business Review)

Landscaping & Gardening Expos

Festive Activities for Consumers

Natural Resources Humid Subtropical Climate Farming with Security Operations (SecOps)

Material Sourcing

Porter's Model Pharma Industry

Porter's model can be applied to any segment of the economy to understand the level of competition within the industry and enhance a company's long-term profitability. The Five Forces model is named after Harvard Business School professor, Michael E. Porter.

Porter's 5 forces are:

Competition in the Industry

The first of the Five Forces refers to the number of competitors and their ability to undercut a company. The larger the number of competitors, along with the number of equivalent products and services they offer, the lesser the power of a company.

Suppliers and buyers seek out a company's competition if they are able to offer a better deal or lower prices. Conversely, when competitive rivalry is low, a company has greater power to charge higher prices and set the terms of deals to achieve higher sales and profits.

Potential of New Entrants Into an Industry

A company's power is also affected by the force of new entrants into its market. The less time and money it costs for a competitor to enter a company's market and be an effective competitor, the more an established company's position could be significantly weakened.

An industry with strong barriers to entry is ideal for existing companies within that industry since the company would be able to charge higher prices and negotiate better terms.

Power of Suppliers

The next factor in the Porter model addresses how easily suppliers can drive up the cost of inputs. It is affected by the number of suppliers of key inputs of a good or service, how unique these inputs are, and how much it would cost a company to switch to another supplier. The fewer suppliers to an industry, the more a company would depend on a supplier.

As a result, the supplier has more power and can drive up input costs and push for other advantages in trade. On the other hand, when there are many suppliers or low switching costs between rival suppliers, a company can keep its input costs lower and enhance its profits.

Power of Customers

The ability that customers have to drive prices lower or their level of power is one of the Five Forces. It is affected by how many buyers or customers a company has, how significant each customer is, and how much it would cost a company to find new customers or markets for its output.

A smaller and more powerful client base means that each customer has more power to negotiate for lower prices and better deals. A company that has many, smaller, independent customers will have an easier time charging higher prices to increase profitability

Threat of Substitutes

The last of the Five Forces focuses on substitutes. Substitute goods or services that can be used in place of a company's products or services pose a threat. Companies that produce goods or services for which there are no close substitutes will have more power to increase prices and lock in favorable terms. When close substitutes are available, customers will have the option to forgo buying a company's product, and a company's power can be weakened.

Understanding Porter's Five Forces and how they apply to an industry, can enable a company to adjust its business strategy to better use its resources to generate higher earnings for its investors.

What Are Porter's Five Forces Used for?

Porter's Five Forces Model helps managers and analysts understand the competitive landscape that a company faces and to understand how a company is positioned within it.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Porter's Five Forces is a framework for analyzing a company's competitive environment.

Porter's Five Forces is a frequently used guideline for evaluating the competitive forces that influence a variety of business sectors.

It was created by Harvard Business School professor Michael E. Porter in 1979 and has since become an important tool for managers.

These forces include the number and power of a company's competitive rivals, potential new market entrants, suppliers, customers, and substitute products that influence a company's profitability.

Five Forces analysis can be used to guide business strategy to increase competitive advantage

Regards,

Adrian Blake-Trotman