Finance Secretary Shona Robison during a visit to Logan Energy Limited in Edinburgh ahead of the publication of the Scottish Budget, December 4, 2024
SCOTTISH Finance Secretary Shona Robison announced that the two-child cap on benefits will be scrapped in Scotland as she pledged record spending for both the NHS and councils in next year’s Budget today.
The moved to scrap the cap would lift 15,000 children out of poverty, Ms Robison said.
She told MSPs as she outlined her draft Budget plans in Holyrood: “Be in no doubt that the cap will be scrapped.”
Ms Robison slammed the UK Labour government’s inaction on a “pernicious” policy considered to be a key driver of child poverty by organisations such as the Poverty Alliance.
She challenged the UK government to work with them and share the necessary information to “build a system” to mitigate it “as early as we can in 2026.”
Amnesty International’s 296-page report – ‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza – documents how, during its military offensive launched in the wake of the deadly Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on 7 October 2023, Israel has unleashed hell and destruction on Palestinians in Gaza brazenly, continuously and with total impunity.
Over the past two months the crisis has grown particularly acute in the North Gaza governorate, where a besieged population is facing starvation, displacement and annihilation amid relentless bombardment and suffocating restrictions on life-saving humanitarian aid.
Amnesty’s report examines in detail Israel’s violations in Gaza over the nine months between 7 October 2023 and early July 2024, with Amnesty interviewing 212 people – including Palestinian victims and witnesses, local authorities in Gaza and healthcare workers – while conducting fieldwork and analysing an extensive range of visual and digital evidence, including satellite imagery. Amnesty also analysed statements by senior Israeli government and military officials, and official Israeli bodies. On multiple occasions, Amnesty shared its findings with the Israeli authorities but has received no substantive response.
Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General, said:
“Amnesty International’s report demonstrates that Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza.
“These acts include killings, causing serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction.
“Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them.
“Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now.
“States that continue to transfer arms to Israel at this time must know they are violating their obligation to prevent genocide and are at risk of becoming complicit in genocide.
“All states with influence over Israel, particularly key arms suppliers like the USA and Germany, but also other EU member states – the UK and others – must act now to bring Israel’s atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza to an immediate end.
“The International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity issued last month offer real hope of long-overdue justice for victims.
“States must demonstrate their respect for the court’s decision and for universal international law principles by arresting and handing over those wanted by the ICC.”
Sacha Deshmukh, Amnesty International UK’s Chief Executive, said:
“As a state party to the Genocide Convention, the UK has a legal obligation to use all reasonable means to help prevent genocide.
“The UK must take urgent steps to make clear to Israel that this country does not support genocidal acts against Palestinians in Gaza, and those acts must end immediately.
“The UK government must, as an urgent first step, work with other countries by all diplomatic and legal means to press Israel into fully implementing the provisional measures ordered by the International Court of Justice.
“To avoid the risk of itself being complicit in genocide, the UK must immediately end all arms transfers to Israel.
“The UK should also press for multilateral targeted sanctions at the UN Security Council against Israeli and Hamas officials most implicated in crimes under international law.
“The UK must act to ensure justice and accountability, supporting the ongoing International Criminal Court investigation into Palestine and executing any ICC arrest warrants.”
Genocide denying UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspending 30 of 350 arms licences to Israel. He also confirms the UK government’s support for Israel’s Gaza genocide and the UK government and military’s active participation in genocide.
Jensen Huang of Nvidia speaks about the future of artificial intelligence and its effect on energy consumption and production at the Bipartisan Policy Center on September 27, 2024 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
“The oligarchic dozen is richer than ever, and they are endowed with extreme material power that can be used to pursue narrow political interests at the expense of democratic majorities,” according to the author of a new analysis.
Just 12 U.S. billionaires now have a collective net worth of over $2 trillion—a figure that amounts to a little less than a third of total federal spending in 2023—according to an analysis out Tuesday from Inequality.org, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).
The $2 trillion number is also twice the amount of wealth that the top 12 US billionaires held in 2020, according to researchers at IPS, a progressive organization.
The full list of 12 billionaires includes Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, Steve Ballmer, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jim Walton, Rob Walton, and Jensen Huang.
“This is an unsettling new milestone for wealth concentration in the United States. The oligarchic dozen is richer than ever, and they are endowed with extreme material power that can be used to pursue narrow political interests at the expense of democratic majorities,” wrote the author of the analysis, Omar Ocampo, a researcher at IPS.
New to the “oligarchic dozen” is Jensen Huang, the co-founder and CEO of the tech company Nvidia. Nvidia, which became the most valuable publicly traded company this year, has seen its profits jump thanks to the world’s ravenous appetite for the artificial intelligence chips that the firm produces. According to the analysis, Huang’s personal wealth “has skyrocketed from $4.7 billion in 2020 to $122.4 billion—a mind-boggling 2,504 percent increase—over the last four years.”
Each of the billionaires on the list “owns or is a controlling shareholder of a business that is investing billions of dollars in artificial intelligence,” according to Ocampo, which raises concerns about their respective carbon footprints.
Fueling AI is energy intensive, and AI data centers in the U.S. are largely powered by fossil fuels, meaning their proliferation poses a threat to the environment and a transition to a green economy.
Ocampo also discusses the political reach of the billionaires on the list. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who respectively own X and The Washington Post, “have both purchased large media platforms, which has granted them the ability to set the terms of public debate with the hopes of influencing public opinion in their favor.”
Musk specifically has established himself as a major power broker within the GOP. The billionaire spent hundreds of millions helping to re-elect Donald Trump and is now poised to play a major role in the president-elect’s administration, helping oversee a new advisory committee tasked with slashing government spending.
As of early December, Trump had tapped an “unprecedented” total of seven reported billionaires for key positions in his administration, according to a separate piece of analysis by Inequality.org.
“We see the effects of this growing concentration of wealth and economic inequality everywhere—plutocratic influence on our politics, wealth transfers from the bottom to the top, and the acceleration of climate breakdown,” Ocampo wrote on Tuesday.
Stephen Feinberg is pictured at the U.S. Capitol on December 11, 2008. (Photo: Jahi Chikwendiu/The The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Stephen Feinberg is co-CEO of Cerberus Capital Management, which owns a company that provided training to members of the hit squad that murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
President-elect Donald Trump has reportedly offered the number-two Pentagon job to a secretive billionaire investor with close ties to the military-industrial complex, potentially introducing additional conflicts of interest to an incoming administration that is set to be rife with corporate executives and lobbyists.
Stephen Feinberg is co-founder and co-CEO of the private equity behemoth Cerberus Capital Management, which owns a firm that provided paramilitary training to members of the elite team that murdered Saudi journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.
Trump drew global outrage for publicly defending the Saudi regime in the wake of the assassination, even after U.S. intelligence agencies established that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman authorized Khashoggi’s murder.
The New York Times reported in 2021 that four Saudis who took part in the 2018 Khashoggi assassination “received paramilitary training in the United States the previous year under a contract approved by the State Department.” Tier 1 Group, an Arkansas-based company financed by Cerberus, provided the training.
“The instruction occurred as the secret unit responsible for Mr. Khashoggi’s killing was beginning an extensive campaign of kidnapping, detention, and torture of Saudi citizens ordered by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, to crush dissent inside the kingdom,” the Times noted.
“Having this revolving door of people who sit on boards of major defense contractors and then cycle in and out of the Pentagon is a problem that did not begin with Trump, but is a problem nonetheless.”
It’s not yet clear whether Feinberg intends to accept Trump’s offer to serve as deputy defense secretary, but news of the choice prompted speculation that Feinberg could be elevated to the top Pentagon spot as Fox News host Pete Hegseth—the president-elect’s nominee for the role—faces skepticism from senators amid new details of the sexual assault allegations against him. (Update: The Times reported Wednesday morning that Trump’s support for Hegseth is “wobbling” and he is “openly discussing other people for the job, including Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.”)
Citing an unnamed person familiar with his thinking, Politicoreported that Feinberg is expected to accept the job offer for deputy defense secretary. Feinberg would also have to be confirmed by the Senate.
The Washington Post, which first reported Trump’s offer on Tuesday, noted that the private equity billionaire is a major donor to the president-elect and has “investments in defense companies that maintain lucrative Pentagon contracts.” The Post observed that Cerberus “has invested in hypersonic missiles” and “previously owned the private military contractor DynCorp.”
Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), told the Post that “having this revolving door of people who sit on boards of major defense contractors and then cycle in and out of the Pentagon is a problem that did not begin with Trump, but is a problem nonetheless.”
“Is he going to be listening to a whole range of constituencies or primarily business constituencies?” Duss asked of Feinberg.
Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, characterized Trump’s Cabinet picks so far as “chaotic evil” and warned that their conflicts of interest could bring horrible consequences for the American public.
“Corruption is not only bad in and of itself,” Hauser told the Institute for Public Accuracy on Tuesday. “It’s also a bad thing that makes other terrible things more likely to happen. If you corrupt the enforcement of environmental protection laws, people will be poisoned by the water they drink and air they breathe. If you corrupt the Department of Labor, workplace safety will collapse over time and wage protections will disappear.”
“That’s what happened under the last Trump administration. This is going to be worse,” Hauser warned. “Food safety issues, automobile safety with driverless cars, rail safety—these are all risks that the Trump team will be taking with the lives of ordinary people.”
Screen grab of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer speaking during Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons, London, December 4, 2024
PRIME Minister … Keir Starmer ruled out electoral reform in the Commons today, brushing aside Labour’s own agreed policy on the issue.
He was challenged by Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey at Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) to give effect to a vote by MPs earlier this week to switch elections to a form of proportional representation.
The Commons voted by 138 to 136, with many abstentions, to approve a Bill introduced by Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Olney to change to PR.
Labour MPs were divided in the vote, with 59 backing Ms Olney’s Bill and 50 opposing.
However, support for electoral reform is official party policy agreed by conference.
None of this cut any ice with Sir Keir when pressed. He told Sir Ed that electoral reform “is not our policy,” which is not true.
