Tag: perpetual war

UN adds 61 firms to settlements blacklist over alleged human rights violations against Palestinians

The UN human rights office has added 61 more companies to a blacklist of firms that it says are involved in violating Palestinian human rights through business ties to Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

The vast majority of the total 214 companies, which are based in 11 countries, are Israeli. Five of the 158 companies listed last year were removed in the latest update.

The blacklist, first published in 2020, was born of a vote by the UN’s human rights council, which has no ability to force companies to act. Its main goal is to name and shame businesses with ties to the settlements.

It is unclear how the inclusion on the list has affected the companies financially.

“This report is another reminder to companies that they have human rights responsibilities and are expected to conduct due diligence to ensure that they do not become involved in human rights violations or abuses,” said Volker Türk, the UN human rights chief, in a statement.

Israel said it “categorically rejects” the publication. “This database is meant to serve as a blacklist against businesses that have committed no wrongdoing,” the Israeli diplomatic mission in Geneva said in a statement. “We call on friends not to yield to this ugly attempt to blacklist Israeli firms.”

The UN office said it had advised the companies of their listing and given them a right of reply.

The latest report comes as Israeli settlements in Palestinian areas have faced new scrutiny.

Earlier this month, Britain banned trade with Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, where it says “settler terrorists” are carrying out “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians. France and Canada announced they would take similar action.

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Israel and the US have battered the international legal order. The impunity must stop

The international legal order is in shambles. But from the ruins of impunity and lawbreaking, a group of nations is working to enforce accountability.

On Monday, the UN general assembly’s high-level meetings opened to news that Washington had drawn up sanctions against the international criminal court, targeting its bank accounts, software, insurers and staff.

On Tuesday, the US president stood at the podium and threatened Iran with annihilation. On Thursday at the same rostrum, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, wanted by the ICC for war crimes, cast all those seeking accountability as “barbarians who threaten our common civilization”. Palestinian officials were absent, denied travel visas by the United States.

Netanyahu has never pretended to respect international law. When South Africa brought its Genocide Convention case against Israel’s actions in Gaza, Netanyahu declared: “Nobody will stop us – not The Hague.” This summer, he mused on American television that, should his plane ever be forced down in a country that honours the warrant, Israel’s special forces could be given “a new task”. The American president has promised he will not be arrested on US soil “in any way, shape, or form”.

I was arrested protesting Netanyahu’s New York visit. Here’s why we took a standRead more

The message to the world is plain: crimes committed by the allies and acolytes of power will never be punished.

This impunity is not limited to Gaza. It’s playing out in the accelerating ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. It has travelled to Lebanon, where Israeli strikes have killed more than 4,000 people this year and displaced more than a million. In southern Syria, Israeli troops shell and raid villages in the countryside around Damascus. In Sudan, massacres are carried out with arms, technology and financing of the United Arab Emirates, an ally of the Israeli government.

Every commander with a patron has learnt the lesson of the past three years. Mass atrocity carries no price if your friends are strong enough.

States that resist encounter punishments in dizzying varieties – sanctions, tarriffs, threats and isolation. South Africa lost US aid after bringing its genocide case to The Hague. Colombia’s president had his visa revoked after speaking out on Gaza in the streets of New York.

This too will not remain confined to the global south. Instruments built for terrorists and drug cartels are now pointed at judges. More than a dozen ICC judges and prosecutors, including the court’s president, already live under US sanctions. A designation of the whole institution would reach every European bank, insurer and technology supplier serving a court that sits in the Netherlands.

Tools like these, once deployed, are never put back in the drawer. Governments in Europe that shrug today should ask how long before the same instruments are turned on their regulators, their competition authorities, their own courts.

What can countries do? History points to some answers.

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New evidence on the Bucha Massacre

The Bucha Massacre, which occurred in March 2022, remains one of the main tragedies of the Ukrainian conflict. Shortly after the Russian strategic retreat and the entry of Ukrainian troops, the narrative quickly began to spread that Russian soldiers had committed a massacre in the city, murdering hundreds of people.

The news spread around the world and was broadcast by all major media aligned with the Atlantic West. Even in spaces that declare themselves neutral, such as Wikipedia, the entry on the Bucha Massacre narrates it as a slaughter perpetrated by Russian soldiers before they retreated from the city. This is, therefore, the “official version” of the story in the Western world and its satellites.

Ukrainian authorities speak of 509 innocent civilians who were allegedly assassinated by the Russians, and indeed Bucha has been used as one of the main arguments to vilify the behavioral standard of the Russians in the special military operation. It seems peculiar to us, however, from the outset that this event was so singular. In general, armies that commit atrocities commit them at various moments and in different places of the conflict, but Bucha constitutes a singular, totally unique, and so far unrepeated instance of an alleged massacre of hundreds of Ukrainian civilians by the Russians.

The topic has recently gained prominence again, with new evidence that was discussed, for example, at the “Dialogue on Fakes 4.0” congress, organized by the Global Fact-Checking Network (a fact-checking agency of which I am a member, along with other journalists). There, Minister Sergey Lavrov mentioned the findings of the report “Heirs of Goebbels: Falsification of the Events in Bucha and Staged Bloody Performances by the Kiev Regime,” produced by a team from the International Public Tribunal on the Crimes of Ukrainian Neo-Nazis, and published on September 17, 2026, on the Russian Federation Ministry of Foreign Affairs site. (https://mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/reports/2142212/)

According to the report in question, it was possible to gather sufficient material evidence indicating that the Ukrainian regime manipulated the facts about Bucha in various ways, one of them being the inclusion of Ukrainian military and paramilitary personnel killed in combat as victims of an alleged “massacre” committed by the Russians. Some of these military personnel may not even have died in the vicinity of Bucha. Furthermore, evidence was obtained of civilians who died of natural causes and whose names were included as having also been victims.

This work by the committee was possible because months after the events in Bucha, the Ukrainian regime inaugurated a memorial containing the names and personal data of the “civilians” who allegedly died in the supposed massacre committed by the Russians. With this, it was possible to cross-reference the data with other databases to check the biography of the dead and confirm the official information – work that was done voluntarily by users of the 2ch.su forum. They discovered at least 50 names of Ukrainian combatants among the names on the memorial, which amounts to approximately 10% of the alleged victims listed.

Among these combatants, by the way, there are several members of the Azov Regiment, a neo-Nazi organization notorious for its atrocities against Russian civilians, such as Evgeny Petrash, Vladimir Bisyaga, Andrey Vaskevich, Ilya Krhenov, among others. Others, such as Igor Kokodinyak and Vladimir Logvinenko, were military personnel who died in other parts of the special military operation zone and not in the vicinity of Bucha.

But of course, the big question about Bucha is the fact that the authentic civilian deaths that occurred at the location in March 2022 were perpetrated by the Ukrainians themselves, which is also confirmed in the report through new testimonial evidence. According to it, Ukraine used artillery against Bucha, after the Russian withdrawal, as soon as journalists were transported to the city, with the aim of turning it into the stage for a grand performance to be displayed to the world.

According to the testimonial evidence gathered, there is even evidence that the journalists’ visit was staged, in the sense that the locations that would be hit by Ukrainian artillery attacks were already known in advance, which means that civilians were killed on purpose with the aim of accusing the Russians of an atrocity – which characterizes a “false flag” attack.

Bucha has become a case to be studied because today the probability that other “false flag” attacks will be produced by Ukraine or the West with the aim of justifying an intensification of hostilities is quite high.

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8 Sailors In Lincoln Strike Group Attempted Suicide During Lengthy Deployment: Acting Navy Secretary

Eight sailors in the USS Abraham Lincoln’s carrier strike group attempted suicide during a deployment that ran 286 days at sea, acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao has told Congress, weeks after the administration waved off reports of deteriorating conditions aboard the carrier.

In a Sept. 22 letter to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Cao said the attempts occurred across the strike group since the Lincoln deployed in November 2025, including the carrier’s crew, its air wing, the escorting destroyers and embarked squadrons. None of the attempts was fatal. The Lincoln operated in the Middle East from January, supported U.S. forces through the war with Iran, and was relieved last month by the USS George Washington.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said in August that conditions aboard had been “completely misrepresented.” That came after reports of rising suicide risk, food rationing, and broken laundry and toilet facilities. U.S. Central Command also called reports of a spike in suicidal thoughts false, along with a report that seven sailors had died in a fight aboard the carrier.

As The Epoch Times notes further, Gillibrand accused the Trump administration of failing to take care of service members.

“What Trump and Secretary Hegseth dismissed as ‘fake news’ turned out to be serious and deteriorating conditions for our service members,” Gillibrand said in a statement on Sept. 24.

“Our troops and their families make immense sacrifices every single day, yet the president dismissed them with open disrespect.”

Cao’s letter to Gillibrand came in response to a letter that Gillibrand and a group of 14 other lawmakers sent to Hegseth last month demanding answers on the conditions of the Lincoln.

The sailors assigned to the Lincoln strike group “demonstrated exceptional resolve under demanding conditions,” Cao said.

“Operational decisions to extend deployments are never made lightly; they are driven by dynamic global security environments and absolute necessity of protecting U.S. national security interests and our personnel and our allies abroad,” he wrote.

Cao told Gillibrand that the Lincoln was deployed with five chaplains, three behavioral health technicians, one clinical social worker, one psychologist, one embedded integrated prevention counselor, and one expeditionary facility dog.

The acting Navy secretary also noted that a sailor assigned to the air wing went overboard in early August but was quickly recovered, received medical treatment, and was transferred off ship for additional care. In addition, another sailor had previously attempted to go overboard in March but was stopped by other sailors, Cao said.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, criticized the Trump administration for not reporting the number of suicide attempts sooner.

“There has been no administration that is less transparent,” he told reporters on Sept. 24.

Warner said that while U.S. sailors will “do their job,” they typically expect a six-month deployment.

The Epoch Times reached out to the Pentagon and the Navy for comment and did not receive a response before publication time.

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U.S. Amb. to China: ‘Don’t Know’ When Taiwan Military Sale Will Happen, ‘Trump Has a Schedule of His Own’

On Friday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “America’s Newsroom,” U.S. Ambassador to China David Perdue said that “we don’t know” when the sale of $14 billion in military hardware for Taiwan that is on President Donald Trump’s desk will be signed, “President Trump has a schedule of his own.” And there hasn’t been any change to U.S. policy on Taiwan.

Co-host Bill Hemmer asked, “Did anything change with regard to the U.S. position on Taiwan in these meetings?”

Perdue answered, “Absolutely not. In Busan, it didn’t even come up. In May, President Xi brought it up. President Trump listened actively. And, in this meeting, it came up briefly. But let me be very clear, President Trump, since he was inaugurated, has not changed the position on the United States’ One China Policy. We fully support the Taiwan Relations Act, the Three Communiqués, and the Six Assurances. President Trump, again, echoed that position of the United States federal government. We have not changed our position on Taiwan, we don’t support independence, but we really don’t support coercion, either.”

Hemmer then asked, “There is a $14 billion military hardware sale that is on his desk and has been there for some time that has not yet been signed that would go directly to helping Taipei defend itself. When will that be signed?”

Perdue responded, “Well, we don’t know. President Trump has a schedule of his own. And he has already sold 50% more arms to Taiwan than any other president since 1979. So, he’s already demonstrated that support. But, again, our position is, we want peace in the strait, we want a peaceful resolution. This is between the people of Taiwan and the people of China.”

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U.S. military lays groundwork for potential action around Cuba

The U.S. Army Reserve is examining whether it can provide the military’s Southern Command with police forces, medical personnel and other support units within the next four months, according to an internal Army message reviewed by CBS News.

Though the message makes no reference to Cuba, the request is for continued military planning aimed at Cuba, according to multiple U.S. officials who spoke to CBS News under condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

There is no indication in the document that any units have received deployment orders. But the planning comes as the Trump administration puts intense economic pressure on Cuba and urges the island nation to make political reforms.

The message does not identify how many troops would be needed in the Southern Command’s region, which covers Central and South America, including the Caribbean. It also does not specify where the forces could be sent or what operation they would support. 

The document reviewed by CBS News says Army Reserve headquarters is seeking feedback from subordinate commands on the possible availability of six types of formations that would fall under the authority of U.S. Southern Command. The units would “possibly [be] needed in 90-120 days,” according to the message, which directs commands to provide feedback to Army Reserve headquarters by Sept. 25. 

Among the units is a combat sustainment support battalion that specializes in coordinating logistics such as transportation, maintenance, fuel and supply needs, along with an engineer battalion. The document also seeks an expeditionary sustainment command that would oversee logistics across a theater of operations. 

The document generated last week also calls for a medical brigade to command and coordinate medical units, as well as a forward resuscitative and surgical detachment to provide emergency surgery and trauma care closer to U.S. forces. Finally, the document seeks a military police brigade — these units typically oversee military police forces responsible for security, detention and other law enforcement missions. 

Contacted by CBS News, the Army Reserve did not respond before publication. 

A spokesperson for U.S. Southern Command said: “Due to operational security concerns, we do not disclose details or comment on U.S. operational movements or potential deployment timelines associated with current or future operations, contingencies, or planning. However, U.S. Southern Command continuously coordinates with the Joint Force to assess a range of potential requirements across its [area of responsibility] in support of assigned missions.” 

Earlier this year, American forces conducted reconnaissance operations on the seafloor and maritime approaches surrounding the Cuban island, multiple U.S. military personnel told CBS News. Separately, U.S. airpower components were placed on heightened readiness and directed to pre-stage personnel for potential deployment. Those plans, however, did not come to fruition. CBS News is withholding certain details from publication that could potentially put U.S. service members at risk.

CBS News reported in May that U.S. intelligence officials were assessing how Cuba would respond to possible U.S. military action, as the Trump administration accused Havana of strengthening ties with Russia, China and Iran. The intelligence community’s 2026 annual threat assessment largely portrays Cuba as an enabling environment for larger geopolitical competitors, rather than as an independent strategic threat.

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How War Propaganda Justifies Conscription into Unjust Wars

Conscription is a form of indentured servitude. Murray Rothbard argued that everyone has a natural right to self-defense, but “we have no moral right to use coercion—the bayonet or the revolver—to force someone else to defend us.”

Rothbard argued that if we want men to stand in our defense, “the way to induce people to volunteer for hazardous jobs is to pay them extra as compensation.” And yet, instead of offering a wage that would reward men who sign up willingly, governments rely on force to press conscripts into service. The conscript is,

. . .seized by the authorities and inducted into the armed forces. There his body and will are no longer his own: he is subject to the dictates of the government; and he can be forced to kill and to place his own life in jeopardy if the authorities so decree.

This debate recently returned to public attention when it was reported that the United Kingdom is reconsidering conscription due to what the UK government sees as escalating hostilities with Russia.

Campaigners are protesting over the prospect of conscription returning amid mounting Russian threats against Britain. A coalition of 13 British peace and faith organisations has launched a petition demanding the Government rule out military conscription, or any compulsory form of national service involving the armed forces. . . There is currently no conscription in Britain, although concerns about World War 3 have fuelled renewed discussions on how the armed forces could be expanded.

For conscription to be even remotely tolerable by the public, it is, at the very least, necessary for warmakers to persuade the public that the war is just, and worth fighting. Otherwise, people are likely to revolt, as happened in New York when the Enrollment Act of March 1863 drafted men to fight Lincoln’s war.

On July 11, 1863 the first names for induction into the army were called. The next day, New York erupted into some of the most violent riots in American history. The office of the provost marshal—charged with enforcing the draft—was burned, railroad lines were destroyed, and telegraph lines cut. . . . Over one hundred people died in the rioting, thousands were wounded, and thousands of African Americans fled New York.

This attempt to corral New Yorkers into the war against their will followed soon after the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863. The implication, following the Proclamation, was that what had started out as a politically-driven war to save the Union was now a moral crusade to free the slaves of the South—surely a just cause! But very few were convinced. John M. Taylor observes that, under the Enrollment Act of 1863,

Wealthy Northerners could either fight or pay a $300.00 exemption from the draft. The Irish, mostly coming from meager circumstances, typically lacked the funds to buy exemptions. Whereas large numbers of wealthy Southerners fought, few wealthy Northerners did. William Tecumseh Sherman alluded to this, stating, “that without conscription there would have been no way to ‘separate the sheep from the goats and demonstrate what citizens will fight and what will only talk.’”

The Emancipation Proclamation was not seen by the draftees as moral justification to fight. For one, the Proclamation belied its own moral authority by failing to free all slaves and only purporting to free those under Confederate control. Freeing only the slaves of one’s enemies, almost two years into the war, marked the Proclamation as a war measure rather than a humanitarian edict.

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How Silicon Valley Became Part of Ukraine’s Military Machine

American Big Tech has become both a sponsor and a direct participant in the Ukrainian conflict. US companies are testing military AI, autonomous systems and battlefield software under combat conditions, effectively using Ukrainian troops as guinea pigs for systems that may later be adopted by the US military.

Russia has already exposed serious weaknesses in some of that technology. Early Anduril drones struggled under Russian electronic warfare, while Starlink-dependent Ukrainian drone operations have faced dedicated Russian efforts to disrupt satellite communications. Equipment that works smoothly on an American test range can fail once Russian forces begin jamming its navigation, breaking its links and finding ways to neutralize it.

The companies developing these systems then get the failure reports, battlefield data and operator feedback needed to rework them. Ukraine gives them a combat environment no peacetime trial can reproduce, while Russian forces keep forcing those technologies to prove whether they actually work.

But which corporations are behind it — and how did they gain access to the highest levels of the Ukrainian state?

Palantir: The AI Layer Behind Ukraine’s Targeting System

Palantir is a US software company specializing in artificial intelligence, data analysis and defense applications, led by CEO Alex Karp. When Karp returned to Kiev on May 12, 2026, Palantir was already deeply integrated into Ukraine’s military infrastructure, with its technology used to analyze battlefield data, process intelligence and support military planning, including operations involving targets inside Russia.

The relationship began in June 2022, when Karp became the first CEO of a major Western company to meet Zelensky in person after the conflict began. By February 2023, Karp said Palantir was “responsible for most of the targeting in Ukraine,” highlighting the company’s role in the intelligence and targeting process used by Ukrainian forces.

Ukraine has accumulated a vast stock of battlefield data. By the end of 2024, the OCHI system alone had collected more than 2 million hours of drone footage, while other military databases contained millions of labeled images by 2026. Russian camouflage, decoys, electronic warfare and disrupted communications make these datasets valuable because Western systems are being tested under conditions no US range can fully reproduce.

In January 2026, Ukraine and Palantir formalized this cooperation through Brave1 Dataroom. The platform allows military AI models to be trained and tested on structured visual and thermal battlefield data, primarily for detecting and intercepting aerial targets, with results used to refine later versions.

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Globalist Canadian PM Mark Carney Tells New York Times He’s Prepared for Military Action from America – Also Reveals His Scheme to “Diversify” Away from U.S.

Far-left globalist Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney appears determined to destroy whatever is left of the close friendship his nation once held with the United States.

On Wednesday, Carney gave an exclusive interview to the leftist New York Times, where he detailed his vision for pulling Canada away from America.

Carney started with a startling revelation: he and his country have been prepared for potential military action with America for roughly a year, should Trump move toward a military invasion.

He took Trump’s threats of making Canada the 51st state seriously, and carefully examined the possibility of a U.S.-led military invasion. Carney declined to discuss in detail what that involved.

Of course, this is just crazy. But Carney says not preparing for something so ludicrous would be “irresponsible.”

“I think you have a responsibility in these roles to look at extreme tail risk,” Carney told the Times.

“That’s just risk management,” he continued. “That’s not a base case, but it would be irresponsible not to prepare.”

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One Hostage and One Million People Will Pay?

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has now said something that should disturb anyone. According to The Jerusalem Post, Katz threatened to destroy what remains of Gaza City and forcibly evacuate around ONE MILLION Palestinians if Hamas takes a single Israeli hostage. Think about what is being said. One person is captured and a million people may be driven from their homes while what remains of their city is destroyed. The Jerusalem Post itself acknowledged that such a statement could make Israel’s defense against genocide and war crimes accusations at The Hague more difficult because international law requires proportionality.

This is precisely why international humanitarian law prohibits COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT. Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states that no protected person may be punished for an offense he or she did not personally commit. Collective penalties and measures of intimidation are prohibited. This principle exists because humanity has already traveled down this road. Governments cannot punish an entire village, city, ethnic population, or civilian society because one person or armed organization committed an offense. Otherwise there is no law of war. There is merely vengeance.

There is also a serious distinction between hostage taking and the capture of an enemy combatant during warfare. Israel deems taken soldiers “hostages” rather than “prisoners of war.” The Geneva Conventions contain an entire framework governing prisoners of war and people detained during armed conflict. The ICRC makes clear that POWs and other wartime detainees are protected by international humanitarian law. Hostage taking is prohibited, but so is collective punishment.

If Hamas deliberately seizes a civilian to compel Israel to act, that can constitute hostage taking. If a combatant is captured during hostilities, the legal analysis is different and depends upon the nature of the conflict and the person’s status. Governments cannot simply erase the laws governing wartime detention by changing the vocabulary.

Consider the scale of what Katz has threatened. Gaza today contains roughly two million people. Katz threatened to extinguish roughly HALF of the entire population of Gaza. He did not say he would punish the people responsible. He threatened to destroy what remains of their city and remove approximately one million human beings.

People seem to misunderstand what genocide actually means under international law. You do not have to exterminate every member of an ethnic or national population before the word becomes legally relevant. The Genocide Convention covers acts committed with the specific intent to destroy a protected group “in whole or in part,” and international courts have interpreted that “part” as having to be substantial. Numbers matter, but so does the significance of the population being targeted and the evidence concerning intent.

Look at Srebrenica. More than 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were murdered while the wider Muslim population was forcibly removed from the enclave. International tribunals concluded that genocide had occurred even though the victims represented only a fraction of Bosnia’s entire Muslim population. The courts looked at the targeted community, the killings, the expulsions and what those actions demonstrated about the intent to destroy that community.

Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states that people cannot be punished for offenses they did not personally commit and expressly prohibits collective penalties. Article 49 prohibits mass forcible transfers from occupied territory except under narrow circumstances involving civilian security or imperative military necessity, with additional protections and an obligation to return evacuees when hostilities cease.

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