Yesterday, after doing my 'evening jobs' I received a text from my sister who had not been able to get through to read this blog which is her custom. I think I know the reason for this which is to do with the 'http://' protocol which is actually a part of each web address and is added by the system if not stated. The domain name should work with either 'http://' or the secure 'https://' but sometimes the second one fails for reasons beyond me. Anyway, I managed to get my sister some links to the actual web address of this blog and to its text backup text version should the problem re-occur and this seems to have solved the problem for her. If you thought that it was not possible to be shocked by anything that Donald Trump says, his latest announcements on Gaza were jaw dropping. Speaking alongside Benjamin Netanyahu, who is the first foreign leader to visit the White House, Donald Trump has vowed that the US would take over war ravaged Gaza and own it, effectively endorsing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, in an announcement shocking even by the standards of his norm-shattering presidency. Trump, who has previously threatened Greenland and Panama and suggested that Canada should become the 51st state, added Gaza to his expansionist agenda, claiming that it could become the 'Riviera of the Middle East' and declined to rule out sending US troops to make it happen. 'The only reason the Palestinians want to go back to Gaza is they have no alternative,' the president told a joint press conference with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House on Tuesday evening. 'It’s right now a demolition site. This is just a demolition site. Virtually every building is down' Trump suggests displaced Palestinians in Gaza be 'permanently' resettled somewhere else. Arguing that Palestinians could live out their lives in 'peace and harmony' elsewhere, Trump continued: 'The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it, too. We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site. If it is necessary, we’ll do that, we’re going to take over that piece, we’re going to develop it, create thousands and thousands of jobs, and it’ll be something that the entire Middle East can be very proud of.' What one makes of all of this is hard to say - but the legalities of taking over a territory, owning it and then ethnic cleansing of its inhabitants must break every tenet of international law it is possible to cite. This, of course, is Donald Trump the property developer speaking but one presumes with the tacit approval of Netanyahu - the neighbouring Arab countries will all reject this incredible solution, however. Whether the Israeli extreme nationalist right wing endorse the Trump plan remins to be seen but from Netanyahu's world view (an ethnic cleansing and a rebuilding of Gaza at American expense) there might be quite a lot to be pleased about. The reaction from the rest of the world, after a certain stunned silence, is predictable. Every Arab state in the region believes in the 'two state' solution and not be regarded as a convenient depository for displaced Palestinians.There is a long and dark history of Palestinians being encouraged one way or another to leave their homes never to return. Many of those living in Gaza's 'refugee camps' are descendants of the victims of the Nakba, as they call it, or the catastrophe when during Israel's first war of independence they had to flee homes on land that is now in Israel. They believe they should be allowed to return to that land, which they say Israelis wrongly took from them. Any acquiescence with another mass displacement would be a betrayal of their forefathers' rights of return, they believe. In the early days of the Gaza war, Israeli right-wing politicians quietly pushed the idea that maybe the world could take Gazans in, give them a better life etc. They don't really want to live there anyway, we were told, they'd be much better off in Michigan, or the emptier bits of Europe, or maybe Jordan and Egypt might be persuaded to take in more in return for the huge amounts of American aid they receive. Already some extreme right wing Israeli groups are relishing the prospect of resettling Gaza once the Palestinians have been 'ethnically cleansed'. One wonders what the reactions of the Americans might be is we tried to claim back Virginia and other colonies lost when America declared its independence.
Occupying some media attention is the strange case of Lucy Letby, the nurse who was convicted of killing seven babies and suspected of killing seven more. But her defence team have assembled an international panel of experts who have concluded that there is no medical evidence that any murders have actually taken place and that the deaths of the babies concerned could be attributed to poor clinical care or vital signs being missed or minimised. Fourteen senior clinicians from around the world have analysed the medical evidence against Letby, including British doctor Neena Modi, a former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. The panel was assembled by Dr Shoo Lee, a retired Canadian doctor based at the University of Toronto who specialises in the treatment of young children. He said the panel worked without payment and were not familiar with the case prior to reviewing the evidence. So we have the possibility that Letby was used as a convenient scapegoat for the failings in the County of Chester hospital which had standards of care that led one of the international panel members to remark that those patterns of care had been deployed in a Canadian hospital, it would have been closed down by now. But occupying a lot of media attention are the two cases (the Southport massacre of young children, the Nottingham stabbings) in which the perpetrators were known to the relevant authorities, but decisive action was not taken. In the case of the Southport murders the young man had been referred to the Government's (anti-terrorism) 'Prevent' programme but was deemed to be out of scope because he was not an adherent to an overarching philosophy such as militant Islam. The Nottingham case seems to have poor professional practice by letting a patient with known violent tendencies be discharged without ensuring that he would take his medication to prevent random acts of violence. There is a pattern in these cases in that the aberrant behaviour seems quite extreme in the first place but the overstretched social and medical services cannot (perhaps because of budget cutbacks) take the necessary preventative action with tragic consequences in each case.