ICJ Must Find Israel Guilty Of Genocide

The arguments have been made to The International Court of Justice in the Hague and it is hard to see how the 15 judges can not find Israel guilty of genocide, of the five definitions, Israel are clearly guilty of three (Killing members of a group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction) so we should find out in the next few weeks their decision.
The ICJ have already ruled that an occupying power cannot claim the right to self-defence but shamefully the UK, in some wrongheaded decision to back Israel, have refused to support the South African led charges although six weeks ago at the excat same court they submitted a 21 page claim of genocide against the Myanmar Government led by the Gambians of committed genocide against the Rohingya ethnic group through its mass mistreatment of children and systematically depriving people of their homes and food.
Human rights groups widely welcomed the UK’s intervention against Myanmar but are now saying it is wholly duplicitous for the UK to hold Israel to a different standard it holds for everyone else.
The UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, has called Gaza: 'a graveyard for children' and said there had been 'clear violations of international law' which prohibits 'collective punishment under all circumstances, committing a war crime' and Human Rights Watch asserted that Israel: 'Have shown a shocking disregard for civilian lives. They have pulverized street after street of residential buildings killing civilians on a mass scale and destroying essential infrastructure' and Reporters Without Borders (RSF) submitted a complaint to the UN alleging Israel had perpetrated war crimes against journalists in Gaza.
If there is any justice then when this hideousness ends then the Palestinians will gain there own state and end the brutal and savage occupation which Israel have been shamefully getting away with for the past 75 years.

US and UK Military Target Houthi In Yemen

Nobody wants to see anyone dropping bombs on other people and as the US and UK get set to do exactly that against the Houthi for a third night running in Yemen, my question is why if it is in order to protect World commercial shipping in the Red Sea, why is it only the US and UK sending the missiles flying?
The Houthis originally said that they were attacking Israeli ships in support of the Palestinians but since November they have sent missiles and drones towards Norwegian, Japanese, Liberian, American and British ships so it seems they consider any nations ships a target but the World seem to be keeping their military at home.
Ten nations yesterday put out a statement justifying the attacks but most pointedly Italy, France and Spain refused to join the UK, US, Netherlands, Australia, Canada, Bahrain, Germany, Denmark, New Zealand and South Korea warning of further action to protect the free flow of Red Sea trade if the Houthi's did not back down.
Italy said they would prefer to pursue a calming policy in the Red Sea, France dismissed the UK's statement that they were taking military action in 'self defence' and were more focused on a diplomatic solution and Spain said it committed to peace and dialogue.
For the last 10 years, the Houthi's have faced similar barrages from the Saudi-led coalition and have not only survived but have become considerably stronger which doesn't bode well for a quick resolution with the Houthi promising retaliation which will only ratchet things up and open the door for escalation, Hezbollah and Israel are teetering on the brink of war which will add another awful dimension to an already horrific situation.
The Houthi's stated goal is to disrupt commercial shipping in the important waterway to force a ceasefire to stop the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza and for the blockade of the Strip to be lifted so one course of action would have been to seek to remove the Houthi pretext by accelerating efforts to end the Gaza conflict but the British and American Governments have shown a distinct lack of enthusiasm to influence Israeli murderous actions in Gaza.
US and British officials are keen to separate the link between the Houthi's actions and what's happening in Gaza but that is hard to dispute as the US and the UK are both heavily embroiled in the Gaza war on the side of Israel.
Why Washington and London opted to strike Yemen, the poorest nation in the World, with bombs and missiles rather than accelerating efforts to end the horrendous violence being perpetrated by Israel in Gaza, where more than 24,000 people have been killed in three months, is an uncomfortable question they will desperately try to avoid answering.

Special Guest Blogger: Shane MacGowan

To everyone i was as a rough, tough Irishman and about as Irish as a shamrock in a Leprechauns top pocket but life began for me in England as i was born in leafy Pembury, Kent and grew up in Tunbridge Wells and it was there that my fee-paying prep school where my creative writing skills were first identified and which got me scholarship to Westminster School in London at the age of 14, but a year later i found my groove when i fell in with the London based Irish Community and was expelled for being in possession of drugs.
At age 17, i spent six months in a psychiatric hospital due to drug addiction and on release i drifted through casual jobs in a record store and as a barman as well as writing a punk fanzine under the pseudonym Shane O'Hooligan but it was when i was photographed at a Clash gig with a bleeding ear after being hit with a beer bottle that i really got noticed.
With my broken teeth and large ears, i might have seemed the most unlikely frontman for a pop group but i formed my own band, the Nipple Erectors, and toured London pubs and clubs and had the idea of singing Irish rebel songs with a punk attitude and changed the name to Pogue Mahone, the Gaelic for 'kiss my arse' but as we gained notoriety, we were asked to change our name and shortened it to The Pogues.
Weirdly we were referred to as an Irish Band despite none of us having been born there but our repertoire of Irish traditional songs gave the impression that were were and using folk band instruments such as a banjo, accordion and tin whistle while singing with a punk vibe was a genius move.
We put out three albums and toured continuously for two years and in 1987 we had success with the Dublinber's singing Irish Rover, Dirty Old Town, Sally MacLennane and The Irish Rover and followed it up with Fairytale of New York with Kirsty McColl.
Every year there would be a debate over whether the word 'faggot' in the song should be censored or not, it was Kirsty who would change the lyrics to 'You scumbag, you maggot, you're cheap and you're haggard' but it regularly won the nations favorite Christmas song because a festive tune about  
Irish immigrants to the US who dealing with despair, broken dreams, and heroin addiction is definitely the song you want playing in the background while you wrap your presents.
If nothing else it paid for my drink and drugs which were becoming a problem, i would frequently miss flights, rehearsals, photoshoots and sometimes just forgot to turn up for gigs but when i painted my hotel room, face and chest blue the rest of the band said enough and sacked me.
I did make up another band called the Shane MacGowan and the Popes but the drink and drugs gave me stomach ulcers and alcoholic hepatitis and that band fell away and then in 2015 i fractured my pelvis and despite now being in a wheelchair, i still managed to break my knee.
Following years of deteriorating health, i died of pneumonia in November 2023, aged 65 and in tribute the president of Ireland called me one of music's greatest lyricists so, in the spirit of The Pogues classic tune and the holidays: Merry Christmas and kiss my ass, ya bastards.

Today Is...Wyatt Earp Dies

In the Wild West your career opportunities were limited to three jobs and Wyatt Earp became an outlaw and lawman but he never bothered with the cowboy job despite that coming with a stylish hat and boots but the job was staring at cows for weeks and stomping through ankle-deep piles of cow turds the whole time as they slowly lumbered their way toward trains to be loaded up, far more excitement to be had both breaking and enforcing the law.
As a young man he was arrested for horse theft and thrown in jail but escaped and headed for Illinois where his brother ran a brothel but when that got busted he went to Wichita with another brothel owning brother but Wichita was a lawless town and when he turned up and saw an advert for a Marshall, they handed him a star and a gun and that's where he learnt his trademark move, whacking people over the head with the gun butt.
Unfortunately the first man he beat the ever-loving tar out of was also a Marshall so he skipped town to Dodge City and joined the Marshal's Office there and came across a Tuberculous infected dentist called Doc Holliday coughing up his guts.
Dodge City was not fond of his shoot-first-dont-bother-asking-questions-later style of law enforcement so he moved on to Tombstone and the coughing Dentist went with him and as his brother was the Marshall there, he was made deputy and began a feud with a bunch of rustlers.
Doc started it, arguing over a card game with the Cowboys and Earp broke up the argument by pulling his signature move and boinking two of them over the head with his gun butt and that escalated to him, his brother and Doc facing five cowboys, two with big headaches at an empty lot behind the OK Corral and 30 seconds later there lay three dead cowboys.
The gang didn't take that laying down, apart from the ones lying down with holes in them obviously, and came back and shot his brother so he began tracking them down and riddling them with holes but apparently shooting fella's for vengeance is frowned upon in law circles so they tried to arrest him so he ran off to New Mexico and found himself refereeing the fight between Bob Fitzsimmons and Tom Sharkey.
He ended up at Hollywood working as an unpaid Western film consultant and died of cystitis today aged 80 years old.

Today Is...National Pharmacist Day

Pharmacy is taken from the Greek word pharmakon which, ironically, means either remedy or poison so it is just as well that Pharmacists undertake a minimum of five years training in chemistry, biology, pharmacology, physiology and pathology because you relly wouldn't want to get those mixed up. 
When we think of pharmacists, we generally picture someone standing behind a counter, filling our prescriptions and offering health advice and as the NHS continues to creak under years of under-investment, they are becoming many peoples first port of call and where they go for flu and Covid shots as their roles and responsibilities continue to expand.
The largest chain of Pharmacists in the UK is Boots and they got themselves into hot water a few years ago when they began selling the 'morning after' contraceptive pill and priced it at £30, five times more than in other European countries.
Boots attempted to justify the cost but saying that by making it so extortionately expensive: 'It helps prevent emergency contraception from being misused or overused' and allows them to offer 'important sexual healthcare advice to women'.
It was pointed out that the pill is a way to avoid unwanted pregnancies, as are condoms but you can buy them for £3 a packet and they didn't come with advice to any men who bought them so was it just women who need to be lectured about having sex?
To be fair they did cut the price and apologise once the news of protests outside the stores and boycott of their goods reached them and threatened their profits although i will never forgive them for making an advert where they took the Christmas Classic and changed the lyrics to 'I Wish It Could Be Summer Everyday' to flog sun tan lotion.

Today Is...National Milk Day

Louis Pasteur must be wondering why he bothered because apparently drinking raw milk is a thing amongst the trendy set now who i hope have their jabs up to date unless the goal is to die from diseases like as listeriosis, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, diphtheria or brucellosis.
The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) says improperly handled raw milk is responsible for nearly three times more hospitalizations than any other food-borne disease source, making it one of the world's most dangerous food products. Between 1998 and 2011, 79% of dairy-related disease outbreaks in the United States were due to raw milk or cheese products.
Raw Milk was wreaking havoc with human bodies before Louis put down his baguette to solve it by heat treating the milk to remove all the harmful bacteria such as Salmonella, Listeria, Yersinia, Campylobacter, Staphylococcus Aureus and Escherichia coli and countries adopted milk pasteurization to prevent disease and loss of life but now raw milk is growing in popularity.
Because blasting hot liquid jets from both ends at once is not desirable, raw milk is banned in Scotland and it's been illegal to sell unpasteurised milk in supermarkets or high street shops since 1985 so it's either semi skimmed in your tea, take it black or hunt down a farmer with a few cows and take it with e-coli, listeria and salmonella.
You could just forgo cows altogether and go with a cockroach farmer because apart from some of the more seedier places to dine, you don't immediately connect cockroaches with dining experience but that could be about to change as alongside the cow and goat on supermarket shelves we could soon be finding cockroach milk.
It is said to taste rather like cow’s milk and follows a company who make ice-cream with milk derived from insects but if it's all the same to them i think i'll stick with the semi-skimmed Cravendale

Today Is...Thomas Paine Publishes Common Sense

The British don't talk about their defeats in war. We especially don't mention the American War of Independence although the part where we burnt down the White House tends to get a mention.
What many people here don't realise is that it was an Englishman who was a major player in stirring up the colonies to refuse to pay their tax and throw our tea into the sea. The turncoat.
There are statues of him in Paris and New Jersey and a monument to him in New York and Napoleon Bonaparte said that 'a statue of gold should be erected to him in every city in the universe.' Those crazy Frenchies and their gold statues.
The name Thomas Paine would be met with blank stares by the majority of the British population as if you had asked them to explain the LBW rule in cricket despite him being named as 'possibly the most influential writer in modern human history.'
Born in Norfolk, in 1737, Paine was a corset-maker, school teacher and excise officer before penning a pamphlet that demanded better pay and conditions for his fellow workers. Benjamin Franklin got wind of it and persuaded Paine to cross the Atlantic where he threw his lot in with those Americans calling for independence and lower taxes because if there are three things Americans don't like it's small portions, spelling properly and paying taxes.
He published another pamphlet (weak wrists much?) called Common Sense which put the case for democracy, against the monarchy, and for American independence from British rule which riled the colonists to demand independence.
One war and a charred White House later and Paine was bought into the early American Government and dashed off a few more pamphlets, including one stirring things up in France as the revolution there took hold.
He sailed to France and discussed with Napoleon on how best to invade England and wrote two more of those pamphlets, one with the snappy title 'Observations on the Construction and Operation of Navies with a Plan for an Invasion of England' and the more to the point 'The Final Overthrow of the English Government' in which he promoted the idea of 1000 gunboats carrying a French invading army across the English Channel.
He returned to America but when he wrote another (you guessed it) pamphlet attacking religion and supporting the abolition of slavery, the Americans took offense and the powers edged him out of the picture and sent him off to write all the flimsy pamphlets his quill wrecked wrists desired far away from the seat of power.
When he died his obituary read 'One by one most of his old friends and acquaintances had deserted him. Maligned on every side, execrated, shunned and abhorred – his virtues denounced as vices – his services forgotten – his character blackened. Death, almost his only friend.'
I would suggest that whether he is a man of vision who changed the World or just a pamphlet writing nancy who betrayed his country would depend upon which side of the Atlantic you are sitting on.

Today Is...Apple Announces The iPhone

Today in 2007, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that he was going to reinvent the phone as he unveiled the very first iPhone and in the first week it sold 270,000 in America and the one million within 74 days although it took a little longer for it to take off in Europe where we carried on with our Blackberry's
and Nokia's until Apple significantly dropped it's price.  
Until the iPhone came about, Apple's history has been very up and down, their computers were bested by PC's and Microsoft and after years of twiddling their thumbs they turned to MP3 players and mobile phones of which we are now up to the 15th Generation at £1200 a time and at some point around the iPhone 7 they made the decision to remove the headphone socket but to make up Apple would flog you a set of compatible Bluetooth headphones for £200 and it could have just been a happy coincidence that Apple owned the number one selling Bluetooth headphone company, Beats. 
As the iPhone price increased for the newer models and it was shown that Apple were deliberately damaging the performance and battery life of older models, forcing users to upgrade to new phones, Apples profits dipped as consumers turned their backs on high-priced smartphones but before anyone starts to feel sympathy for Apple, according to an analysis by research firm IHS Markit, the parts for the £1200 iPhone costs £264 which means that Apple have been making monster profits on their devices for years so the shareholders won't be begging for change or going short for a while yet.
Apple is facing competition from a multitude of rivals from around the globe, all vying for a slice of the lucrative smartphone market and matching or exceeding Apple’s iPhone on hardware quality but costing much less.
Apple got greedy and took it's users for mugs who would pay anything to get their hands on the Apple phones but they are now finding out that maybe they were not as big a mugs as they thought and i'm glad about that.

Today Is...Elvis Day

Between making a record as a surprise for his mum in 1953 and eating himself to death in 1977, Elvis acted in 31 films and as an actor it was said he was a great singer but that wasn't always the case.
He got a C for music at school and in a singing contest at a country fair he came 5th so it could be taken as a lesson not giving up your dream or as he would probably prefer, thinking 'what do you know' to music teachers and country fair song judges because he went on to become so famous that he was called the King so f**k 'em, thank you very much.
As well as the films, he released 117 singles, 50 albums and gave careers to thousands of impersonators around the World but the greatest hit he is most remembered for is the one where he hit the floor in his bathroom.
There are many more dignified ways to die than being found face down in the bathroom with your underpants around your ankles and if he was given a choice it would probably be in bed surrounded by several buckets of fried chicken and a plate of banana, peanut butter and bacon sandwiches.
Suspicious Minds was another one of his and there have been a few of those regarding if it was actually him who was sprawled all over the toilet floor that day and the simple answer is of course it was, if he was going to plan his own death it would be dying saving orphans from a burning building or drowning whilst rescuing puppies, not dying form the exertion of trying to push one out.
He did have a great voice and he was an extremely handsome man and he also had some great songs with Suspicious Minds winning a TV Poll a while back but he did have more than a few stinkers in his back catalogue, Teddy Bear and Old Shep are particularly cringe.
Why all those Elvis impersonators are the later white rhinestone jumpsuit types when he was bloated and wheezy i don't get because he probably deserves to be remembered as the good looking, hip swaying rocker instead of the bloated chocolate bar frying mess he became.

Stay Warm, Stay Alive

I  am just about to set off on my weekly work 300 mile journey from the South Coast of England and head towards somewhere the MET Office are telling me i really shouldn't be heading towards as temperatures plunge to below zero.
The MET Office have been making cold weather warnings for the last few days with yellow warnings (likely that the weather will cause some low level impacts,
including some disruption to travel) for snow, sleet and ice pretty much covering the British Isles but now they have upgraded it to amber which warns of increased likelihood of severe weather, which could potentially disrupt travel, cause road and rail closures, power cuts and the potential risk to life and property.
Now Public Health Officials for the week ahead have joined in with their own amber cold-weather alert for the north-west of England, the West Midlands, East Midlands and south-west of England and a yellow alert for the north-east of England, Yorkshire and The Humber, East of England, south-east of England and London from tonight until Friday with a warning that ‘cold weather impacts are likely to be felt across the whole health service with potential for the whole population to be at risk'.
Worryingly, the warning to health and social care workers comes with a warning that there will probably be an 'observed increase in mortality across the population'.
Maybe crank up the heating or put on a jumper if you can this week and Health Officials advise not letting your indoor temperatures drop below 18°C which may concern some people in a cost of living crisis but the vast majority of the 13,400 people who died from the cold last winter only know one thing, they wish they had put an extra bar on the fire and then been alive to make an agreement with the utility company when the weather warmed up.