Jack Hibbs, a far-right anti-LGBTQ pastor, conspiracy theorist, and Christian nationalist, posted a video on his YouTube channel earlier this week in which he lashed out at the protests that have sprung up on college campuses around the country in opposition to the ongoing war in Gaza.
Hibbs, an ardent Christian Zionist whose own support for Israel is riddled with antisemitism, declared that these campus activists have no First Amendment right to protest because, by virtue of protesting, they are proving that they are not even real Americans.
“This morning, I turned on the news and I watched the idiocy of the news media—from channel to channel to channel covering Columbia University and NYU—say the same thing: ‘You know, they’re just expressing their First Amendment rights. This is the First Amendment in action,'” Hibbs sneered. “Those are the words of fools. Fools!”
“We’ve got people who I believe have forfeited their rights to the First Amendment,” Hibbs declared. “They don’t have the First Amendment [right] to do what they’re doing on over 220 university campuses.”
[...]
“That’s not your First Amendment right to shout, ‘Fire’ in a theater,” Hibbs insisted. “Neither is it your First Amendment [right] to say that you’re using the First Amendment to speak your opinion when you’re not even an American. You say, ‘Pastor, I was born and raised here.’ Just because you were born here doesn’t mean you’re an American. That’s ridiculous. You don’t even know what ‘American’ is if that’s what you think.”
Far-right Christian Nationalist pastor Jack Hibbs wrongly asserts that campus protesters who are protesting the Gaza Genocide “have no constitutional rights” and aren’t Americans.
Hibbs is wrong: the protests are 1st Amendment-protected speech.
Commemorations Marking The 80th Anniversary Of D-Day Take Place In Portsmouth
Prince William, King Charles III, Queen Camilla, Rishi Sunak, his wife Akshata Murtyn, and Foreign Secretary David Cameron attend the UK's National Commemorative Event for the 80th anniversary of D-Day, hosted by the Ministry of Defence on Southsea Common on 5 June 2024 in Portsmouth, England.
King Charles III and Queen Camilla lead the commemorative events in Portsmouth ahead of the actual 80th Anniversary of D-Day on June 6th.
Veterans, VIP Guests and school children are attending an event on Southsea Common.
Portsmouth was where tens of thousands of troops set off to Normandy to participate in Operation Overlord.
They established a foothold on the French coast and advanced to liberate northwest Europe.
📸: Andrew Matthews - Pool / Kin Cheung - Pool / Leon Neal / Getty Images
Disclaimer: The UN has so far not been able to produce independent, comprehensive, and verified casualty figures; the current numbers have been provided by the Ministry of Health or the Government Media Office in Gaza and the Israeli authorities and await further verification. Other yet-to-be verified figures are also sourced.
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By: M.J. Koch
Published: May 10, 2024
The United Nations is reporting lower revised figures on the confirmed number of Palestinian Arab deaths in the Israel-Hamas war, calling into question the death toll that has been provided by the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry.
In March, the director of the United Nations Children’s Fund, Catherine Russell, cited data from the Hamas-run health ministry when she said that more than 13,000 children have died since October 7, “an astronomically horrifying number.”
On Thursday, though, the UN released new figures, noting a difference between the total deaths “reported” by the health ministry in Gaza and a lower number of fatalities that had been “identified.”
The difference between the numbers is attributed in the report to the fact that some Gazans have been reported missing or are buried under debris of buildings damaged during the war and unable to be accounted for.
The new data show that 7,797 children have been “identified” as having died in Gaza since the war began, substantially lower than the “reported” number of deaths. Neither the UN report, though, nor the Gaza Health Ministry specifies what age is considered the cutoff between children and adults in their death counts.
Out of the more than 34,000 “reported fatalities” — a figure that has been repeated across numerous press outlets, including in the New York Times on Friday — the UN Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs asserts as of May 8 that 24,686 are “identified.”
Of those 24,686 identified as having died, the UN reports, 10,006 were men, 4,959 were women, 1,924 were elderly, and the remainder were children. The report notes that the tally does not include “more than 10,000 reported missing or under the rubble.”
Asked by a reporter on Friday how the death numbers were revised, the deputy spokesman for the UN secretary-general, Farhan Haq, said, “In the fog of war, it’s difficult to come up with numbers. We get numbers from different sources on the ground, and then we try to crosscheck them. As we crosscheck them, we update the numbers, and we’ll continue to do that as that progresses.”
The UN report includes a disclaimer that the agency “has so far not been able to produce independent, comprehensive, and verified casualty figures.”
The global body added that “the current numbers have been provided by the Ministry of Health or the Government Media Office in Gaza and the Israeli authorities and await further verification.”
Gaza’s health ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its count. It has repeated that women and children have made up about two-thirds of those killed. The Israeli military said in February it has killed more than 10,000 Hamas terrorists through air strikes and ground operations launched in response to October 7.
The new fatality figures are about one-third lower than what was initially reported by the UN, yet Mr. Haq said that people “can consider them reliable from the fact that we’re continually checking them.”
Mr. Haq added that “numbers get adjusted many times over the course of a conflict. Once a conflict is done, we’ll have the most accurate figures. But we’re just going with what we can absolutely confirm, which will always be the low end of what the numbers are.”
Critics of the death statistics put forward by the UN and Gaza Health ministry, noting the lack of specifics on the age cutoff between child and adult fatalities, suspect that some young men in their late teens, many of whom are active Hamas combatants, could be among those counted as child deaths in reports.
The UN’s press office did not immediately respond to the Sun’s request for comment on the matter.
==
Who would have thought that the numbers from a literal Islamic terrorist organization would be unreliable propaganda? It truly is shocking.
Note carefully that point about children. When it says "7,797 children (32%)," what they're actually saying is "Hamas uses child soldiers."
(T/N: *Organization tasked with excavating the remains of Korean War veterans to return them to their families.
2. Abbreviation for ‘Ministry of National Defense Excavation Team’.)
Experts said a military assault of this kind by the Israelis would unleash "a slaughter of civilians." It did. They also predicted it would result in a "tragedy beyond words." It has.
Despite street protests worldwide, desperate pleas from humanitarian organizations, persistent demands from United Nations agencies and leaders, and standing orders from the International Court of Justice in The Hague, the military onslaught being carried out by Israel in the Gaza Strip continued on Thursday with fresh reports of innocent civilians being killed and a situation on the ground that has become synonymous with "hell on earth."
The carnage and devastation was all predicted and warned against and yet the United States and other Israeli allies have stood aside as the death toll mounts and the situation on the ground results in the slaughter of civilians in their tents, the ongoing malnutrition of children and babies, targeting of medical personnel and aid workers, and unimaginable images of carnage this week in Rafah and across Gaza for all the world to see.
The World Food Programme on Thursday said that Israel's ongoing assault on Rafah—which U.S. President Joe Biden said would be a "red line" but has continued to support—"is having a devastating impact on civilians and humanitarian operations. Adults and children are beyond exhausted from constant displacement, hunger, and fear."
On Thursday, new photos (warning: graphic) were published of a 7-month-old baby, Fayiz Abu Ataya, who died of malnutrition after he could not be saved at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al Balah, Gaza.
The people who live in Gaza, said the WFP, "are desperate for the war to end—as are humanitarian workers on the ground, who are largely displaced and dispersed along with the people they are meant to serve. There is little [our agency] can currently do in Rafah, with stocks very low and mobility severely restricted."
"Further escalation in the conflict in Gaza," said the agency, "could deepen a humanitarian catastrophe and bring aid operations to a standstill."
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) on Wednesday warned that humanitarian facilities in Rafah have been “forced to close one after another” with only one hospital in the area functional and that one only “partially.”
The flow of humanitarian aid supplies into all of Gaza—”already insufficient to meet the soaring needs” of its people, said OCHA—has fallen by 67% since May 7.
It was OCHA spokesperson Jens Laerke, speaking in Geneva on May 3, who warned that a full-scale assault on Rafah like the one now being witnessed would "mean more suffering and death" for the people trapped there.
As Common Dreamsreported at the time, not only did Laerke say the operation would unleash "a slaughter of civilians"—which has now come to pass—but also land an "incredible blow to the humanitarian operation in the entire strip, because it is run primarily out of Rafah."
Earlier that same week, U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths offered this prediction: "The simplest truth is that a ground operation in Rafah will be nothing short of a tragedy beyond words. No humanitarian plan can counter that. The rest is detail."
And those dire predictions have now come to pass.
In its Thursday statement, WFP reiterated the call by many within the United Nations, including Secretary-General António Guterres, demanding an immediate cease-fire and an end to the restriction and blocking of aid by the Israeli government. "We need all border crossings and crossing points within Gaza to be open," the agency said.
The United States government has done nothing to stop the ongoing catastrophe, say critics, but continues to provide plenty of weapons and ongoing political cover.
Late Wednesday night, USAID administrator Samantha Power acknowledged publicly, that "humanitarian partners" of the U.S. "working in Gaza tell us that conditions are worse now than ever before" and that "Israeli military operations and closed crossings are making it extremely difficult to distribute aid."
Despite that, the Biden administration continues to stand aside and allow Israel to have its way in Gaza, even after a Sunday bombing of a tent encampment by Israel killed an estimated 45 people and wounded hundreds more in what analyses showed were weapons supplied by the U.S. government.
According to new figures released by the Gaza Health Ministry on Thursday, at least 36,224 Palestinians have been killed and 81,777 wounded in Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 7. In the last 24 hours, the ministry said, 53 people were killed and over 350 injured due to the Israeli assault.
Also on Thursday, funerals were held for some of those killed on the previous day, including two medics with the Palestine Red Crescent, Haitham Tubasi and Suhail Hassouna. PRCS said the pair were targeted by the IDF in their ambulance while in the line of duty trying to save others:
"The Israeli occupation forces deliberately bombed the ambulance vehicle despite it bearing the internationally protected Red Crescent emblem," said the PRCS. "With the martyrdom of paramedics Haitham Tubasi and Suhail Hassouna, the number of PRCS staff members killed since the beginning of the aggression on Gaza has risen to 19, all targeted by the occupation while performing their humanitarian duties."
According to the latest figures from OCHA and the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, the Israeli attack on Gaza—coupled with evacuation orders from the Israel Defense Force (IDF)—has displaced more than 940,000 people from Rafah over the last three weeks, with an additional 100,000 people forced to flee for safer conditions in northern Gaza.
"We are way past the red line," said U.S. Congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman, a Democrat from New Jersey, on Wednesday.
"The recent strikes on a Palestinian refugee camp, which killed dozens—including children burned alive in their tents—are unconscionable," Coleman continued, echoing human rights voices from around the world. "We cannot continue supporting this. Nobody is safer because of this."
Naturally, Webbon’s comments generated some controversy, which prompted him to double down during his livestream podcast on Wednesday.
“My hometown and my neighborhood, my state, is being flooded with non-citizens, and then even those who are citizens … are still worshiping false gods,” Webbon griped. “They’re not American in any sense of our heritage, and primarily I’m talking about that being a problem as it pertains to religion.”
“They worship other gods,” he continued. “They are Hindu. They are Muslim. They are Jews. They are not Christians.”
Webbon said that he and his fellow white Christians have a “civic duty” to ensure that their children and grandchildren “have the privilege of growing up in a country that bears at least some semblance to the country that you got to grow up in and is not completely decimated by pagan gods and foreign people from foreign lands.”
[...]
Webbon is a militant Christian nationalist who believes that the American people are too degenerate, stupid, and cowardly to abide by the Constitution and therefore must be governed by a Christian dictator who “just rules with an iron fist” and forces everyone to, at the very least, “pretend to be Christian.” Under such a dictator, Webbon wants to see the Apostles’ Creed added to the Constitution; abortion, pornography, no-fault divorce, in vitro fertilization, and birth control outlawed; and women banned from voting.
In addition to serving as pastor at Covenant Bible Church in Texas, Webbon is also the founder of Right Response Ministries, through which he organizes events like “Blueprints for Christendom 2.0: Seven Doctrines for Ruling the World,” which took place earlier this year and featured fellow Christian nationalists like Doug Wilson and Oklahoma state Sen. Dusty Deevers as speakers.
Christian Nationalist pastor and founder of Right Response Ministries Joel Webbon has a delusional belief that too many non-Christians (by his standard) living in his neighborhood is a “sign of God’s Judgement.”
Scientists have cleared a significant hurdle in the years-long effort to save Africa’s northern white rhinoceros from extinction with the first-ever rhino pregnancy using in vitro fertilization.
The lab-assisted pregnancy, which researchers will announce today, involved implanting a southern white rhino embryo in a surrogate mother named Curra.
The advance provides the essential “proof of concept” that this strategy could help other rhinos, says Jan Stejskal of the BioRescue project, the international group of scientists leading this research.
Curra died just a couple months into her 16-month pregnancy from an unrelated bacterial infection, Stejskal says.
However, the successful embryo transfer and early stages of pregnancy pave the way for next applying the technique to the critically endangered northern white rhino.
The process was documented exclusively by National Geographic for an upcoming Explorer special currently slated to air in 2025 on Nat Geo and Disney+.
BioRescue expects to soon implant a northern white rhino embryo into a southern white rhino surrogate mother.
The two subspecies are similar enough, according to the researchers, that the embryo will be likely to develop.
Eventually, this approach may also help other critically endangered rhinos, including the Asian Javan rhinoceros and the Sumatran rhinoceros, which each now number under 100 individuals, Stejskal says.
But the northern white rhino’s current situation is the most pressing by far.
There are no males left, and the only two remaining animals are both elderly females that live under armed guard on a reserve in a 700-acre enclosure in Kenya called Ol Pejeta Conservancy.
The boxy-jawed animals once roamed across central Africa, but in recent decades, their numbers have plummeted due to the overwhelming international demand for their horn, a substance used for unproved medicinal applications and carvings.
Made from the same substance as fingernails, rhino horn is in demand from all species, yet the northern white rhino has been particularly hard-hit.
"These rhinos look prehistoric, and they had survived for millions of years, but they couldn’t survive us,” says Ami Vitale, a National Geographic Explorer and photographer who has been documenting scientists’ efforts to help the animals since 2009.
“If there is some hope of recovery within the northern white rhino gene pool — even though it’s a substantially smaller sample of what there was — we haven’t lost them,” says conservation ecologist David Balfour, who chairs the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s African rhino specialist group.
Blueprints for rhino babies
To stave off the animal’s disappearance, BioRescue has used preserved sperm from northern white rhinos and eggs removed from the younger of the two remaining females.
So far, they’ve created about 30 preserved embryos, says Thomas Hildebrandt, the head scientist of BioRescue and an expert in wildlife reproduction based at the Leibniz-Institute of Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin.
Eventually, the team plans to reintroduce northern white rhinos into the wild within their range countries.
“That’d be fantastic, but really, really far from now—decades from now,” says Stejskal.
Worldwide, there are five species of rhinoceros, and many are in trouble.
Across all of Africa, there are now only about 23,000 of the animals, and almost 17,000 of them are southern whites.
Then there are more than 6,000 black rhinos, which are slightly smaller animals whose three subspecies are critically endangered.
In Asia, beyond the critically endangered Javan and Sumatran rhinos, there’s also the greater one-horned rhino, whose numbers are increasing and currently are estimated to be around 2,000.
The BioRescue effort has experienced many setbacks, and even though the team now has frozen embryos, the clock is ticking.
The researchers intend to use southern white rhinos as surrogate moms for the northern white rhino embryos.
However, scientists want any northern white rhino calves to meet and learn from others of their kind, which means they need to be born before the two remaining females die.
“These animals learn behaviors — they don’t have them genetically hard-wired,” says Balfour, who’s not involved with the BioRescue work.
But birthing new animals in time will be a challenge.
“We’re really skating on the edge of what’s possible,” he says, “but it’s worth trying.”
Najin, the older female, will be 35 this year, and Fatu will be 24.
The animals, which were born in a zoo in the Czech Republic, are expected to live to about 40, says Stejskal, who also serves as director of international projects at the Safari Park Dvůr Králové, the zoo where the animals lived until they were brought to Kenya in 2009.
Impregnating a rhino
The next phase of BioRescue’s plan involves implanting one of their limited number of northern white rhino embryos into a southern white rhino surrogate mother — which the group plans to do within the next six months, Stejskal says.
They’ve identified the next surrogate mother and set up precautions to protect her from bacterial infections, including a new enclosure and protocols about disinfecting workers’ boots.
But now, they must wait until the female rhino is in estrus — the period when the animal is ready to mate — to implant the egg.
To identify that prime fertile time, they can’t readily perform regular ultrasounds at the conservancy as they might do in a zoo.
Instead, they have enlisted a rhino bull that has been sterilized to act as a “teaser” for the female, Hildebrandt says, adding that they must wait a few months to make sure that their recently sterilized male is truly free of residual sperm.
Once the animals are brought together, their couplings will alert conservancy staff that the timing is right for reproductive success.
The sex act is also important because it sets off an essential chain of events in the female’s body that boosts the chances of success when they surgically implant the embryo about a week later.
"There’s little chance the conservancy staff will miss the act. White rhinos typically mate for 90 minutes," Hildebrandt says.
What’s more, while mounted on the females, the males often use their temporary height to reach tasty plant snacks that are generally out of reach.
Boosting genetic diversity
With so few northern white rhinos left, their genetic viability may seem uncertain.
But the BioRescue team points to southern white rhinos, whose numbers likely dropped to less than 100, and perhaps even as few as 20, due to hunting in the late 1800s.
Government protections and intense conservation strategies allowed them to bounce back, and now there are almost 17,000.
“They have sufficient diversity to cope with a wide range of conditions,” says Balfour.
Researchers don’t know exactly how many southern white rhinos existed a century ago, he says, but it’s clear that the animals came back from an incredibly low population count and that they now appear healthy.
Beyond their small collection of embryos, the BioRescue team hopes to expand the northern white rhino���s gene pool by drawing from an unconventional source — skin cells extracted from preserved tissue samples that are currently stored at zoos.
They aim to use stem cell techniques to reengineer those cells and develop them into sex cells, building off similar work in lab mice.
According to their plan, those lab-engineered sex cells would then be combined with natural sperm and eggs to make embryos, and from there, the embryos would be implanted into southern white rhino surrogate mothers.
Such stem cell reprogramming work has previously led to healthy offspring in lab mice, Hildebrandt says, but rhinos aren’t as well-studied and understood as mice, making this work significantly challenging.
A global effort
The northern white rhino revitalization venture has cost millions of dollars, supported by a range of public and private donors, including the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
Other partners on the effort include the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, the Czech Republic’s Safari Park, Kenya Wildlife Service, Ol Pejeta Conservancy, and also Katsuhiko Hayashi, a professor of genome biology at Osaka University in Japan who conducted the mouse stem cell research.
Building upon Hayashi’s stem cell techniques could ultimately bring the northern white rhino gene pool up to 12 animals — including eggs from eight females and the semen of four bulls, according to Stejskal.
An alternative approach to making more babies, like crossbreeding northern and southern white rhinos, would mean the resulting calves wouldn’t be genetically pure northern white rhinos, Hildebrandt notes.
The two subspecies look quite similar, but the northern version has subtle physical differences, including hairier ears and feet that are better suited to its swampy habitat.
The two animals also have different genes that may provide disease resiliency or other benefits, Hildebrandt says.
There are unknown potential differences in behavior and ecological impact when populating the area with southern white rhinos or cross-bred animals.
"The northern white rhino is on the brink of extinction really only due to human greed,” Stejskal says.
“We are in a situation where saving them is at our fingertips, so I think we have a responsibility to try.”
Experts Call For Long-Term, Joint Seawater Monitoring To Collect Prosecution Evidence As Radioactive ☢️ Substance Detected For First Time Near Fukushima N-Plant
— Zhang Changyue | September 03, 2023
Japan's reckless dumping of Nuclear ☢️ Wastewater poses a grave danger to Earth. Cartoon: Carlos Latuff/Brazil 🇧🇷
As Japan 🇯🇵 has detected the radioactive substance tritium for the first time after it started dumping the Nuclear-Contaminated Wastewater, Chinese experts on Sunday called for a long-term and joint monitoring program by international community on the radioactive substances in the seawater to collect and accumulate evidence for future prosecution against Japan.
Ten becquerels per liter of tritium was detected in a seawater sample taken on Thursday about 200 meters north of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant's underwater discharge tunnel, which is the first time that the radioactive material was detected in a seawater sample since Japan started the dumping of the nuclear-contaminated wastewater into the Pacific Ocean on August 24, the Japan News reported.
According to Kyodo News, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) said the detection of tritium can be considered as affected by the dumping but without any security problem.
As TEPCO and Japan's Environment Ministry claimed that Tritium levels in seawater sampled at sites near the plant were below the detectable limit, Chang Yen-chiang, director of the Yellow Sea and Bohai Sea Research Institute of Dalian Maritime University, told the Global Times on Sunday that "time" is the key factor in monitoring radioactive substances.
"It is not long since Japan began dumping the nuclear-contaminated wastewater into sea, so it is normal that we would see the current low levels of the detected radioactive substances," Chang noted, saying that countries in the Pacific regions can engage in a joint and long-term research and testing of radioactive substances through international cooperation.
Gao Zhikai, Vice President of the Center for China 🇨🇳 and Globalization, a Beijing-based nongovernmental think tank, echoed Chang. Gao said China could consider collaborating with other countries and some nongovernmental environmental organizations to set up a permanent monitoring station on behalf of the international community to collect relevant radiation data, for example, by sending a ship to the exclusive economic zone around Fukushima.
A Citizen Group in Fukushima is preparing to sue the Japanese government and TEPCO on September 8 with more than 100 plaintiffs to demand the cessation of the dumping, Jiji News reported. The legal team said the extent to which radioactive substances other than tritium are present in the wastewater has not been clarified, and the Japanese government violated the promise made with the Fukushima Prefectural Federation of Fisheries Cooperative Associations not to take any action without the understanding of the stakeholders, thereby infringing upon the fishermen's fishing rights and threatening the consumers' right to live in peace.
Gao said Japan's dumping of the nuclear-contaminated wastewater can be regarded as an act of infringement since the behavior will definitely result in infringement upon the legitimate rights and interests of individuals and organizations. He suggested China work with other countries to establish a specialized legal committee as soon as possible to deal with acts of infringement and to collect evidence of the types of damage caused by Japan's dumping of the nuclear-contaminated water worldwide.
According to Kyodo News, the Japanese Civic Group "National Liaison Committee Against the Release of Contaminated Water from Nuclear Power Plants" filed a complaint to the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office on Friday against Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and TEPCO President Tomoaki Kobayakawa for causing potential damage to non-residential buildings and deaths due to professional negligence over the dumping of nuclear-contaminated water.
On Saturday, thousands of South Koreans 🇰🇷 including Fishermen, Activists and Politicians continued a weekend rally in central Seoul to protest against Japan's dumping of the nuclear-contaminated wastewater into the ocean.
The participants shouted slogans like "Immediately stop the marine dumping of radioactive wastewater" and "Prohibit import of all Japanese aquatic products," urging the South Korean government to file a lawsuit with the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea against the Japanese government.
Small Man to the Sacred Family
in Village of Iron 12:12
Let hope make your heart glad. Keep sending your voice to the Great Spirit, even when the road gets hard to walk.