Politics

The final numbers are in, and according to AFP, Saudi Arabia carried out 153 executions in 2016 based on official announcements, fractionally lower than the year before.

As AFP adds, the ultra-conservative kingdom is one of the world’s most prolific executioners and has a strict Islamic legal code under which murder, drug trafficking, armed robbery, rape and apostasy are all punishable by death. Once charged, the likelihood of avoiding a terminal sentence is nominal.

Over the past 68 years, Israel has done nothing but deliberately subjugate Palestinians to humiliation, suffering, death and destruction, all in front of a gobsmacked world. Israel has not just committed unspeakable acts of genocide against the Palestinian people but done so with absolute transparency. 4thMedia reports: Last week, the world stood fixated at a largely symbolic gesture by the United Nations in which it found the continued Israeli occupation of the West Bank of Palestine to be illegal. Or did it?

Submitted by Daniel Greenfield via FrontPageMag.com,

It was the end of the big year with three zeroes. The first X-Men movie had broken box office records. You couldn’t set foot in a supermarket without listening to Brittney Spears caterwauling, “Oops, I Did It Again.” And Republicans and Democrats had total control of both chambers of legislatures in the same amount of states. That was the way it was back in the distant days of the year 2000.

In 2016, Republicans control both legislative chambers in 32 states. That’s up from 16 in 2000.

Israel’s security cabinet said on Sunday that remains of the members of Palestinian resistance movement Hamas, killed during anti-Israel operations, would not be returned to their families for burial. The announcement was made via a statement posted on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s official Twitter account. The statement said the bodies would be interred in a cemetery established for this purpose, but did not elaborate on the burial plan.

Distinguished economist Dr. Paul Craig Roberts warns that although the neoconservatives (neocons) have been discredited, they still have a dangerously powerful influence on US foreign policy. Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has been reportedly advising US president-elect Donald Trump on pursuing the neoconservative agenda of pivoting toward China while bringing in Russia from the cold. Dr.