The Commissioner-General of UNRWA, Karen AbuZayd, expressed her horror to the extensive destruction visited upon Gaza Strip today and her deep sadness to the terrible loss in human life. UNRWA, the United Nation’s Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, strongly urges the Israeli Government to heed calls for ceasing its bombardment on Gaza. Israel is a signatory to international conventions that protect non-combatants in times of conflict. These conventions are worthless if they are not upheld... UNRWA recognizes Israel’s legitimate security concerns however, its actions should be in conformity with international humanitarian law and it should not use disproportionate force. UNRWA calls on Israel to guarantee humanitarian agencies unrestricted and secure access into Gaza and respect its obligations under international humanitarian law by ensuring the safety of the Palestinian civilian population.
- scott willeke 
[1d 11hr ago]
Right of return: Article 49. The second paragraph of Article 49 provides that persons displaced during armed conflict must be transferred back to their homes as soon as hostilities in the area in question have ceased.
- scott willeke [1d 11hr ago]
Collective punishments: Article 33. No protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited. Under the 1949 Geneva Conventions collective punishments are a war crime. In World War II, Nazis carried out a form of collective punishment to suppress resistance. Entire villages or towns or districts were held responsible for any resistance activity that took place there. The conventions, to counter this, reiterated the principle of individual responsibility.
- scott willeke [1d 11hr ago]
Collective punishments: Article 33. No protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.
- scott willeke [1d 11hr ago]
Collective punishment is the punishment of a group of people as a result of the behaviour of one or more other individuals or groups. The punished group may often have no direct association with the other individuals or groups, or direct control over their actions. In times of war and armed conflict, collective punishment has resulted in atrocities, and is a violation of the laws of war and the Geneva Conventions.
- scott willeke [1d 11hr ago]
On January 24, 2008, the United Nations Human Rights Council released a statement calling for Israel to lift its "siege" on the Gaza Strip, allow the continued supply of food, fuel, and medicine, and reopen border crossings. According to the Jerusalem Post, this was the 15th time in less than two years the council condemned Israel for its human rights record regarding the Palestinian territories. The proceedings were boycotted by Israel and the United States. On March 7, 2008, several international aid groups, including Amnesty International, CARE International UK, and Oxfam, issued a report saying that the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip was more acute than at any time since the beginning of the Israeli occupation in 1967. They urged Israel to lift the blockade, characterizing it as *collective punishment* against the 1.5 million residents of the territory.
- scott willeke [1d 11hr ago]
According to emergency services inside Gaza, at least 436 Palestinians have been killed so far, including at least 75 children, while more than 2,700 have been injured. Four Israelis have been killed in the same period by Palestinian rockets.
- scott willeke [1d 11hr ago]
I'm not economist, but this looks scary to me... "As of yesterday, the debt stood at nearly $10.7 trillion, of which about $4.3 trillion is owed to other government institutions, such as the Social Security trust fund. Debt held by private investors totals nearly $6.4 trillion, or a little over 40 percent of gross domestic product. Economists from across the political spectrum have endorsed the idea of going deeper into debt to combat what many call the most dangerous economic conditions since the Great Depression. The United States is in relatively good financial shape compared with other industrial nations, such as Japan, where the public debt equaled 182 percent of GDP in 2007, or Germany, where the debt was 65 percent of GDP, according to a forthcoming report by Scott Lilly, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress."
- scott willeke [2d 2hr ago]
Leverge downstream caches by using URLs effectively.
- scott willeke [2d 15hr ago]
Summary: Startups want to hire workers, not managers. That is certainly true, but at some point it also doesn't benefit the company. To my surprise, I found that keeping 25, 30, and 40 people focused and productive is a challange that deserves a specialist. I can't imagine keeping 100 productive without at leastb a couple great managers by my side.
- scott willeke [2d 15hr ago]
Haaretz, Israel's oldest daily newspaper, is also reporting on the war in Gaza...
- scott willeke [4d ago]
‘Israel claims that the Arabs left because they were ordered to, and deliberately incited into panic, by their own leaders who wanted the field cleared for the 1948 war’, while ‘The Arabs charge that their people were evicted at bayonet-point and by panic deliberately incited by the Zionists.’
- scott willeke [4d ago]
""New Historians" have presented a viewpoint suggesting around half of the Palestinians of the exodus were purposely expelled by Israeli army, though this was not an organized policy.[11][12] However, Walid Khalidi and other Palestinian historians, supported by Ilan Pappe, defend the thesis that the expulsions formed part of a deliberate plan."
- scott willeke [4d ago]
By 1951, the United Nations (UN) estimated 711,000 Palestinian refugees existed outside Israel,[4] with about one-quarter of the estimated 160,000 Arab Palestinians remaining in Israel as "internal refugees." Today, Palestinian refugees and their descendants are estimated to number more than 4 million people.
- scott willeke [4d ago]
Did you ever wonder how those refugee camps got to be in Gaza?
- scott willeke [4d ago]
Want to do a small thing towards alleviating the poverty and suffering of the world's poorest people? Do it with a charity that has a 4-star rating by Charity Navigator, the largest charity evaluator in the United States.
- scott willeke [4d 5hr ago]
Summary: "We have a right to kill civilians too."
- scott willeke [5d 11hr ago]
Normative rules are determined by power relations. Those with power determine what is legal and illegal. They besiege the weak in legal prohibitions to prevent the weak from resisting. For the weak to resist is illegal by definition. Concepts like terrorism are invented and used normatively as if a neutral court had produced them, instead of the oppressors. The danger in this excessive use of legality actually undermines legality...
- scott willeke [6d 17hr ago]
A Zionist who has had enough...
- scott willeke [1 wks ago]
I should write my patent rant down sometime. This is a ridiculous claim. I know that companies used to rent computing time from other companies with mainframes before I was born.
- scott willeke [1 wks ago]
A SATA card I gave to Cole.
- scott willeke [1 wks 1d ago]
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