​Israel has imposed additional economic sanctions against Palestine in response to its unilateral decision to join 15 international conventions last week which Tel Aviv claims to be in breach of conditions of the ongoing "peace talks". “It has been decided to freeze the transfer to the Palestinian Authority of the taxes collected by Israel on its behalf,” an Israeli official told AFP. Reuters too confirmed the reports adding that Tel Aviv will deduct “debt payments” from tax transfers which the Palestinians receive. Israel will also place a limit on Palestinian bank deposits in Israel. Israel monthly collects some $110 million in taxes on goods bound for the Palestinian territory which roughly amounts to around two-thirds of the income received by the Palestinian Authority. Palestinian debts to Israel for services total at least a month's worth of revenue, local Israeli media reports. Palestine was quick to denounce the new sanctions. “These sanctions will not scare us and they're evidence to the world that Israel is a racist occupation state that has resorted to the weapon of collective punishment in addition to other practices including settlements and their expansion and the denial of our most basic rights as a people,” Senior Palestinian official Yasser Abed Rabbo told Reuters.

PressTV. State of Palestine can accede to Geneva Conventions: Bern

Washington's offer to provide $1 billion in loan guarantees to help Ukraine is worthless as there are no banks willing to finance the recovery of crisis-hit country, President Vladimir Putin said Friday. ● Putin called Washington's negative response to his letter addressed to European leaders, which contains proposals on how to solve the Ukrainian crisis, "a bit strange" as the United States was able so far only to offer guarantees rather than actual loans. "What are these guarantees to the banks that would be ready to issue loans, but there are no such banks, which means there is no aid," Putin said at a meeting with members of Russia's Security Council. "We are seriously concerned about this," he added. Russia will fully honor its obligations to supply natural gas to European partners, Russian President Vladimir Putin said.

Financial Times graphic based on IEA, Eurostat, EIA data

President Putin has written to 18 European countries, warning that Ukraine’s debt crisis has reached a “critical” level and could threaten transit to Europe. He also called for urgent cooperation, blaming Russia’s partners for a lack of action. Among the countries who’ll receive the letter are major consumers of Russian gas such as Germany, France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, Moldova, Poland and Romania. Given the accumulated $2.2 billion gas debt owed by Ukraine’s Naftogas, Russia’s Gazprom will be forced to ask Ukraine for advance payments, Putin said in his letter to European partners, referring to the 2009 gas contract signed between Moscow and Kiev. “In other words, we’ll be supplying exactly the volume of gas that Ukraine pays for a month in advance,” as Itar -Tass quotes Putin's letter. Putin added that introducing advance payments would be an extreme measure. “We understand that this increases the risks of unsanctioned retrieval of gas flowing through the territory of Ukraine to European consumers. And it could also hinder accumulation of gas supplies in Ukraine necessary to provide for consumption during the autumn-winter period.” Stable transit of Russian gas to Europe would require an additional 11.5 billion cubic meters of gas for Ukraine’s underground storages, which would cost $5 billion, Putin explained. Given all the discounts Russia has provided in the last four years, Moscow has subsidized Ukraine’s economy to the tune of $35.4 billion, coupled with a $3 billion loan tranche in December last year. “I would underline – nobody except Russia has done this,” Putin wrote in the letter.

F. William Engdahl : White House Lies to EU about US Gas Supply

A report from The Washington Post, which highlights the increasing number of Afghan children who are being killed by unexploded ordnance on abandoned NATO/ISAF firing ranges. The report says that ‘of the casualties recorded by the United Nations, 88 percent were children’, with ‘most of the victims . . . taking their animals to graze, collecting firewood or searching for scrap metal’. A bare minimum of 77 people have been killed in this fashion since 2012, but the number is likely higher.

National Security Agency (NSA) whistle-blower Edward Snowden testified before the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) in Strasbourg this week via video link from Moscow, giving extended remarks on the subject of the US government’s surveillance operations. ● In his testimony, Snowden said the NSA has “specifically targeted the communications of either leaders or staff members in a number of purely civil or purely human rights organizations…including domestically, within the borders of the US.” Snowden said that the NSA has been targeting “peaceful groups, unrelated to any terrorist threat,” citing surveillance operations against the United Nations Children’s Fund. The NSA engages in indiscriminate spying based on a “de facto policy of guilt by association,” Snowden said. Snowden’s remarks come as yet another refutation of the US government’s claims that the surveillance operations are directed exclusively against terrorist plotters. Instead, the spying apparatus targets billions of telephone and Internet users worldwide, with special attention going to critics of, and rivals to, US imperialism.

Bill Van Auken ■ The thrust of the article—and, according to the Times, of the report itself—is summed up in its headline: “Russia failed to share data on suspect, report says.” “The Russian government declined to provide the FBI with information about one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects that would have likely have led to more extensive scrutiny of him at least two years before the attack,” the inspector general’s report claims, according to the Times account. It quotes one of the unnamed “senior American officials” as stating: “They found that the Russians did not provide all the information they had on him back then, and based on everything that was available the FBI did all that it could.” This tendentious assertion manages to turn reality inside out, blaming the Russian government for the failure of US authorities to intercept Tsarnaev before he carried out a bombing on American soil. The reality is that Moscow’s intelligence agency, the FSB, cabled the FBI in March 2011 with an explicit warning that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, an ethnic Chechen, was associating with Islamist militants and posed a threat of terrorism. [...] The timing of the Times article and the inspector general’s report upon which it is based suggests a preemptive attempt to frame any public discussion on the first anniversary of the Boston bombings. The official narrative—that the FBI did all it could but was hindered by an uncooperative Russia—is designed to suppress any questioning of the links between the bombings, US intelligence and Washington’s covert operations aimed at destabilizing the Russian North Caucasus.

On Sunday 6th April, the London Review of Books published an article by Seymour Hersh about the chemical weapon attacks in Ghouta and surrounding areas in August 2013, in which he makes a number of explosive claims.

● British scientists at Porton Down had established that the Sarin used in the attacks didn’t match any Sarin known to exist the in Syrian regime’s Arsenal, and then told their U.S. counter-parts that the case against the Assad regime would therefore not ‘hold up’.
● That actors within the Turkish military and intelligence establishment thought they could make Obama enforce his ‘Red Line’ on chemical weapons usage by ‘dabbling with a sarin attack inside Syria’.
● That when the Obama regime claimed after the attacks that only the Assad regime had access to Sarin, they knew this to be incorrect, as it was contradicted by a Defense Intelligence Agency assessment from June 20th 2013.
● That a senior CIA Official had sent a message in August 2013 stating that the attacks were ‘not the result of the current regime. UK & US know this’.
● And most explosively of all, that the U.S. Intelligence community had reason to believe, based on communications intercepts, that the attacks were ‘a covert action planned by Erdoðan’s people to push Obama over the red line’. That is, a false flag attack designed to draw the U.S. into an open war with Syria.

The article has caused much consternation among those people in the corporate media and the NGO community who are 100% certain that the Assad regime was responsible for the attacks...

Jonathan Cook: Seymour Hersh and the spineless nay-sayers
In light of Hersh’s recent article on Ghouta, worth revisiting this AP piece from August 29th 2013