RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-airstrikes-hit-southwest-syria-breaking-a-ceasefire-deal-1529853026

The Syrian regime’s main military ally, Russia, carried out airstrikes Sunday in the country’s southwest, defying a cease-fire pact with the U.S. and Jordan, as forces aligned with President Bashar al-Assad pushed to capture one of the last opposition strongholds.

The Russian strikes, which have been accompanied by regime barrel bombs and mortar shells, are the latest signs of the high-stakes military maneuvers unfolding in a volatile corner of southwest Syria. Forces aligned with President Assad have threatened a ground offensive, dropping leaflets that demand the surrender of rebels in the area. At least five civilians have been killed in the bombardment, which also destroyed a hospital and emergency rescue center, according to antigovernment activists.

For weeks, the U.S. has warned the Syrian regime not to violate a cease-fire agreement brokered last year with Russia and Jordan that stretches across the Syrian provinces of Daraa and Quneitra.

But the U.S. appears intent on not getting dragged into a confrontation between the rebels and Mr. Assad’s Russian and Iranian-backed forces. On Saturday night, as Russian airstrikes were beginning, U.S.-allied rebels were told by the Americans not to expect a military intervention on their behalf, according to several rebel commanders.

The State Department expressed concern about the airstrikes and said it had been in touch with the Russian government and “parties on the ground.” CONTINUE AT SITE

https://bit.ly/2K6CIsb

The UN Human Rights Council (HRC), on the one hand, and human rights, on the other hand, constitute a classic oxymoron, as underlined by the country-membership of the Council.

Moreover, since its establishment in 2006, and just like its predecessor, the UN Commission on Human Rights, the HRC has been dominated by non-democratic regimes, which have been hostile to the US.

For example, the anti-US, pro-Ayatollahs member-state Venezuela has robbed its opposition-led legislature of any effective power, jailing political opponents and prosecuting civilians in military courts. The Democratic Republic of Congo is ruled by a ruthless president who is holding on to power beyond the constitutionally mandated two-term limit, repressing, silencing and murdering opponents. Pakistan features a proliferation of military courts with death sentences for members of the opposition, unaccountability for human rights violations, the absence of a free press, no tolerance of religious minorities and women’s rights and is fertile ground for anti-US Islamic terrorism. In Afghanistan, neither the government nor the Taliban opposition adheres to human rights, which has resulted in a massive toll of murders and executions, many of them carried out by government-supported illegal gangs. Another member of the HRC, Burundi, which has been accused by the HRC, itself, of crimes against humanity and refuses to cooperate with the HRC investigation. Burundi is ruled by a president, whose term has been extended beyond constitutional limits, and whose security organs have followed a routine of kidnapping, torture, arbitrary arrests, executions and the “disappearance” of citizens. The repressive Cuban regime has sustained arbitrary arrests of opposition leaders, human rights leaders and free press activists.

Other member-states of the HRC – despite their non-democratic regimes and questionable-to-horrendous track records on human rights – are Rwanda, Senegal, Togo, Ivory Coast, Angola, Iraq, Ethiopia, Ecuador, Tunisia, Qatar, China, etc.

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/06/let-women-carry-mace/

Another woman is dead at the hands of an alleged rapist and, once again, those who should know better blame toxic masculinity and the way boys are raised. While this guff obscures the sins of a turn-’em-loose bench, it won’t dissuade a single criminal. Pepper spray and electro-shockers just might.

Masa Vucovic, Jill Meagher and now Eurydice Dixon – three young women who lost their lives in Melbourne. Their headline names are known better than many other, equally innocent victims killed or brutalised for the same reason: they were women. They were daughters, sisters, partners of loving men, each unfortunate to have met their killers in a park, on the fitness run, or simply while strolling home.All were killed by human garbage, bipedal filth whose lusts knew no bounds. Their lives were extinguished for reasons which, to any decent man, are abhorrent, disgusting and inspire only contempt for their attackers. The sooner and the longer they are consigned to prison and left there to rot the better.

I do not wish to be unkind to Victoria Police, but the legacy of former chief commissioners who turned the force into a blue-uniformed social work department — guard dogs re-trained as comfort dogs – lingers like a fog to hide and obscure what should be every law enforcement agency’s primary mission to protect life and property. When push-in robberies see sporting goods stores sell out of baseball bats while senior police convene multiculturally photogenic community summits and burble of outreach to disaffected youths, the public isn’t getting the protection it is entitled to expect and the police force duty-bound to provide.

Not that senior police are alone in refusing to grasp the nettle of their chartered responsibility, for others are equally keen to push preferred barrows. When Jill Meagher was raped and butchered, Melbourne’s Sydney Road was packed with a protesting crowd, most of whose members would have turned out in the belief that such crimes must be stopped and that, unlike her murderer and serial rapist Adrian Ernest Bayley, their perpetrators must not be set free by the courts. What they attended turned out to be something very different — a denunciation of “victim blaming”, which no one had done, and a demand that “men”, all men, be reformed, not just the tiny minority of testosterone-infused monsters who make late-night parks unsafe.