BRICS is a trading bloc not a military alliance.

Also, BRICS is rumored to be starting its own currency and we have already seen stuff like Sri Lanka using rupees to deal with its economic crisis. That’s going to be very attractive to some countries hence the clamour to join.

I agree with you. Beheading means decapitation as a form of execution.

At this point it’s really splitting hairs. The IDF literally has a program called “Where’s Daddy” that allows them to make sure suspects are at home with their families when they bomb them; so I think it’s safe to infer that they intend to kill at least some portion of children.

Their harrassment of Ms Bensouda is super creepy, first they sent an envelope of money to her house and then Mossad came to her in a hotel room:

In one of the earliest encounters, Cohen surprised Bensouda when he made an unexpected appearance at an official meeting the prosecutor was holding with the then DRC president, Joseph Kabila, in a New York hotel suite.

Sources familiar with the meeting said that after Bensouda’s staff were asked to leave the room, the director of the Mossad suddenly appeared from behind a door in a carefully choreographed “ambush”.

If there’s a food source they’re all over, it will smell like that even when they leave.

Definitely. Formic acid.

Hmm the US isn’t a particularly good example of a democracy.

Part of a wider pattern. The US is losing soft power in many places, I think.

I agree with you, I just mean it’s hard for us to enforce it when we are being blocked by powers like the US etc.

Thanks, fantastic article, nice to get the BBC perspective on this as I wonder sometimes about The Irawaddy’s possibly being a bit optimistic.

This is the crux of it:

The ICC has 124 state parties, while the United Nations has 193 member states. This disparity makes clear the gap between what the ICC seeks to achieve – namely, universal accountability for international crimes – and what it can practically achieve when it lacks the support of implicated or nonaligned countries.

Narrator: “…it was.”

dangerous precedent, where the US government shows complete disrespect of international law

With all due respect the US has been in open contempt of international law for the past 20+ years.

Guantanamo for example is completely illegal.

Ethnic cleansing is the part where they displace the target population.

Genocide is the part where they kill the target population.

Obviously there’s a fair bit of overlap between the two.

It isn’t “OP’s invention” at all, it’s the article’s title at the time of first publication. Here is the Guardian announcing the article under its original title.

Maybe spend 5 seconds on a basic search before you accuse people of stuff.

Given that the article says the aid will still have to go through an Israeli checkpoint in order to be sent north (where the worst famine is) I will be amazed if the small amount of aid scheduled to come through this pier doesn’t suffer the same distribution blockages as other aid.

South Africa’s a democracy with a history of opposing Israeli apartheid.

It’s really not surprising that it’s taking the lead on this.

Empty optics only work if people are not paying attention to facts. I don’t think that’s going to happen here.

Sorry to burst your bubble but it’s technically incapable of enabling sufficient aid.

• the US plan is to start with 70 trucks worth of aid and ramp it up to 100 trucks

• even before the war Gaza needed about 400 trucks of aid, that was when people still had homes and hospitals

• there are IDF outposts on each side of the pier meaning it could become a choke point just like the crossings

• the IDF have reinvaded the North where the worst of the famine is

• the closing of the Rafah crossing means famine conditions are rapidly worsening in the South as well now.

• once people are actually starving, you need aid workers to distribute aid.

Yes, I agree. WWII had a bunch of war crimes in it. I would rather we learned from them than we tried to justify them.

McNamara says of the firebombing of Japan that LeMay knew it was a war crime.

Good question. The answer seems to be Cocaine Shark sequel.

This appeared in my feed right next to a movie called “Cocaine Werewolf”. Seemed fitting.