Ros Altmann

Pensions, retirement, savings, investment, social care, economics expert. Believes pensions are about people, not just about money

[Ros Altmann @rosaltmann]

You might like to see my comments on the Government's apparent instruction to the OBR to assume acceleration of the State Pension Age. https://t.co/fXz5ov7izE

[Ros Altmann @rosaltmann]

https://t.co/TYLZoyNceW

[Ros Altmann @rosaltmann]

Strong chance 'nightmare' IHT pension reforms will 'simply not work' https://t.co/qWOQanDwzm via @profpensions

[Ros Altmann @rosaltmann]

Source: The Telegraph https://t.co/bwf4r3QSoS

[Ros Altmann @rosaltmann]

https://t.co/48NoDRB6uf

[Ros Altmann @rosaltmann]

Source: This is Money https://t.co/jWDlsaYLYU

[Ros Altmann @rosaltmann]

A pensions manifesto for the new prime minister https://t.co/46Ez2stmHc via @profpensions

[Ros Altmann @rosaltmann]

I just wanted to flag up this chance for the new PM to use pension schemes to boost growth, without changing the fiscal rules or increasing taxes. This could be a real game-changer and some radical new thinking would be a win-win for all. Read my blog https://t.co/uubMDMO7oU

[Ros Altmann @rosaltmann]

Source: Mail Online https://t.co/rIcTQVSnZx

[Ros Altmann @rosaltmann]

govt needs to rethink its plans to inpose inheiance tax on unused pensions. thve plans will prove unworkable, unfair and costly with ludicrous complexity https://t.co/NSo6KqabpQ

[Donal Moloney @DonalMoloney10]

Everyone knows that a two-state solution would involve an Arab-only Palestine alongside a multiethnic Israel with a sizable Arab minority with full citizenship. Yet we're supposed to believe that Israel is the racist apartheid ethnostate. As ever, hatred of Israel is subrational.

[Ora Levitt 🇮🇱 חיילת צה"ל 🇮🇱 עם ישראל חי @IDFsoldiergirl]

They say: “Jews never stepped foot here before European Zionists arrived in the late 1800s.”
But that’s false.
📷 Jerusalem already had a Jewish majority in the mid-1800s, decades before political Zionism even existed. Longing had already become presence. A living Jewish community in its ancient capital.
In 1857, James Finn, the British Consul in Ottoman Jerusalem, reported to London:
“The Jews form the largest portion of the population of Jerusalem.”
That official record confirmed what Jewish history had always known.
🇮🇱 Gaza had Jewish life since biblical times. In the 16th century it was home to Rabbi Israel Najara, one of the great Hebrew poets and the rabbi of Gaza at the time.
🇮🇱 Safed was a thriving Jewish epicenter in the 16th century. It became the world center of Kabbalah, home to Rabbi Isaac Luria and Rabbi Yosef Karo, and for roughly a century rivaled Jerusalem in influence.
🇮🇱 Hebron maintained an ancient and continuous Jewish community, with synagogues, neighborhoods, burial grounds, and scholarship rooted in the patriarchal era.
🇮🇱 Tiberias was a central rabbinic authority from the 2nd to 5th centuries CE. The Sanhedrin held its final seat there, and the Jerusalem Talmud was finalized in its academies.
History did not begin in the 1800s.
The Zionist movement did not invent Jewish history here. It restored and strengthened what already existed.
🇮🇱 The Nation of #Israel Lives (author unknown)

[Mr PitBull Stories @MrPitbull07]

On August 7, 1942, a 28-year-old German oil executive stood outside a Jewish orphanage in Nazi-occupied Poland and watched SS soldiers throw babies out of windows.

That moment changed his life forever.

His name was Berthold Beitz.

At the time, he wasn’t a resistance fighter. He wasn’t a politician. He wasn’t part of an underground movement.

He was a businessman working for the German oil industry in Boryslaw, a town in occupied Poland where Hitler’s war machine depended heavily on oil production.

Beitz had a wife at home.
A small daughter.
A comfortable position.

And after witnessing what the SS were doing to Jewish families, he went home and told his wife Else:

“We have to do something.”

Most people in occupied Europe survived by looking away.

Berthold and Else refused.

Over the next several years, they would save around 800 Jewish lives.

Not with weapons.
Not with speeches.

With forged papers.
False job titles.
Hidden rooms.
And unimaginable courage.

Beitz discovered that Jews officially classified as “essential oil workers” were temporarily protected from deportation.

So he started expanding the definition.

Tailors became “petroleum technicians.”
Hairdressers became “oil specialists.”
Rabbis and scholars suddenly had paperwork claiming they were critical to Germany’s fuel production.

He signed the papers himself.

When deportation trains arrived, Beitz sometimes walked directly up to the cattle cars and demanded prisoners back, claiming they were essential workers needed for the war effort.

And astonishingly, it often worked.

While Berthold rescued people publicly, Else turned their home into a sanctuary.

Jewish children hid in the cellar while Nazi officers sat upstairs eating dinner.

Parents who knew they were about to be murdered entrusted their children to her arms.

If the Gestapo had searched the house thoroughly, the Beitz family would have been executed.

They did it anyway.

In 1943, the Gestapo finally investigated Berthold after forged work permits were discovered.

He denied everything.

Somehow, he escaped arrest.

By the end of the war, approximately 800 people were alive because the Beitz family refused to accept evil as normal.

After the war, Berthold rebuilt his life quietly.

He became one of the most powerful industrialists in Germany, eventually helping lead the massive Krupp steel empire and later ThyssenKrupp.

He advised world leaders.
Helped strengthen postwar Germany.
Worked behind the scenes during the Cold War.

But he almost never spoke publicly about what he had done during the Holocaust.

His own grandson later admitted the family learned many details only by reading newspapers.

When people called him a hero, Berthold rejected the word.

He said:

“I was just a human being who saw what was happening.”

In 1973, Israel honored Berthold and Else Beitz as Yad Vashem “Righteous Among the Nations,” one of the highest recognitions given to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.

Berthold Beitz died in 2013 at age 99.

Else died the following year.

The children they saved went on to have children of their own.

Today, thousands of people exist because one German couple refused to look away while others did.

Berthold Beitz spent the rest of his life believing he had simply done what any human being should do.

History tells us otherwise.

Because when cruelty becomes ordinary, the people who choose compassion become extraordinary.

[Mor Edge Insight @MorEdge_Insight]

Listen to Sophia Salma Khalifa, a Muslim Arab-Israeli woman, tell the truth about Gaza.

In 2005, Israel completely left Gaza. No Jews alive or dead. They even took the graves. They handed over greenhouses, homes, and infrastructure, hoping Gaza would become the Singapore of the Middle East.

The people of Gaza had a real chance.

Then they elected Hamas.

Hamas burned it all down, murdered everyone who opposed them, stole the opportunity, and turned Gaza into a launchpad for terror instead of a thriving state.

This is what happens when radical Islamists win. They don’t build. They destroy.

Powerful testimony from someone who actually understands the reality on the ground.

Civilizational suicide has consequences.

H/T @prageru

[Captain Allen @CptAllenHistory]

In 2005, Israel gave Palestinians exactly what the world demanded: “Land for Peace.”

They unilaterally withdrew from the entire Gaza Strip, but got no peace.

The IDF forcibly removed every last Jew — even digging up Jewish graves. Gaza was made completely Jew-free, exactly as Palestinians demanded.

Israel handed over thriving communities, farms, and hundreds of millions in infrastructure — including productive greenhouses that could have become an economic engine for a Palestinian state.

What did the Palestinians do with this gift?

They destroyed it.

Mobs looted and burned the greenhouses. They ransacked and demolished synagogues. They celebrated with Hamas flags and gunfire.

Then, in January 2006, they voted Hamas — a genocidal terrorist organization whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews — into power.

By 2007, Hamas completed a bloody coup, threw Fatah members off rooftops, and seized total control of Gaza.

The result?

- Tens of thousands of rockets fired at Israeli civilians

- More than 500 miles of underground terror tunnels

- Billions in international aid stolen for war, not welfare

- Gaza transformed into a fortified Islamic terror enclave

Land for peace was tried — and violently rejected.

Everything Israel gave away in 2005 became the launchpad for the October 7 Massacre.

This is the ultimate proof: the Palestinian movement has never wanted a state living next to Israel. Its goal has always been the destruction of the Jewish state — in any part of the Land.

Important note: The blockade only came after Hamas seized power in 2007 and turned Gaza into a launchpad for war. And when that happened, Egypt joined it too.

Disengagement didn’t bring peace.
It brought the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

[◀️ Defy The Lie ▶️ @DefyTL]

The US Federal Authorities just found 4 more UN officials who directly kidnapped civilian women both those that were alive and those that had been murdered and subjected them to torture and sexual violence and are perusing criminal charges against the UN for being implicit in terrosist activities.
Let's not forget about the EU officials who admitted to taking bribes from Qatar. UN offcials are currently being investigated for the same crime and in additional payments from Iran. This will explain how the UN decided to place Iran (terrosist entity) on the UN Human Rights Council.

[Carlos Abadi @NewSamawal]

Israel just published a detailed dossier on UN bias in Gaza. Most people won't read it. Here's what's in it:
🔹 OCHA undercounted aid trucks entering Gaza by nearly 10,000 vs. Israel's own records
🔹 UNRWA staff participated in Oct. 7 — the UN called it "a few bad apples" and opened no serious investigation
🔹 The IPC famine report relied on an undisclosed dataset with measurements that exceeded anything in medical literature
🔹 UN Women ignored Israeli victims entirely
🔹 The Secretary-General blacklisted the IDF while staying silent on Hamas
This isn't Israel crying bias. It's a documented, agency-by-agency breakdown.
Read it yourself: https://t.co/QFnaukXbat

[Hussain Abdul-Hussain @hahussain]

Of the 750,000 Palestinians who left what became Israel in 1948, how many of them owned land deeded to their name?
In an Ottoman Empire where tax farmers owned land on behalf of the state and taxed peasants who lived on the land and worked it, I’d say that the number of Palestinians who lost deeded real estate was low.
Bear in mind that in any country, private ownership of land is — on average — half (in Canada 11 percent, in the U.S. 60 percent) of the total territory of the state.
For some reason, Global Intifada seems to think that Israel belongs to Palestinians through the power of real estate deeds— a weak argument.

[Captain Allen @CptAllenHistory]

On This Day — May 28, 1948

Israel appointed a Jewish American badass as its first general in nearly 2,000 years — David “Mickey” Marcus.

Marcus was a tough Brooklyn kid, a West Point graduate, and a decorated U.S. Army colonel and war hero who volunteered to help the newborn Jewish state on the brink of annihilation.

He had already lived a legendary life: helped take down Lucky Luciano, parachuted into Normandy with the 101st Airborne, liberated Nazi death camps, and worked on the Nuremberg trials.

Then, in 1948, he walked away from a promising U.S. Army career, took the fake name “Michael Stone,” and sailed to Israel to turn the ragtag Haganah into a real army. To turn it into the IDF.

See him immortalized by the great Kirk Douglas in the clip below from the 1966 movie Cast a Giant Shadow.

On May 28, David Ben-Gurion gave Marcus command of the Jerusalem front. The situation was dire: 100,000 Jews in Jerusalem were under siege. The Arab Legion (with British officers) had cut the only supply road, starving the city. Food was rationed to near nothing. Water was cut off. People were eating mallow leaves and facing surrender.

Marcus didn’t flinch.

He helped design and build the legendary Burma Road — a desperate, hand-carved bypass through mountains and ravines under enemy fire. Convoys, jeeps pushed by hand, and even donkeys carried supplies over terrain many thought impossible. That road broke the siege and saved Jerusalem.

He trained fighters, designed command structures, and brought American military know-how to men and women who had just survived the Holocaust and refused to die again.

On June 10, hours before a ceasefire, Mickey Marcus was tragically killed by friendly fire — a young sentry didn’t recognize him in the dark. He was wrapped in a white sheet, walking back to his quarters. He never saw the full victory he helped make possible.

Israel buried its first general with full honors. His body was returned to West Point, where his tombstone reads: “A Soldier for All Humanity.”

Mickey Marcus is the ultimate “Never Again” hero: a man who had everything in America but chose to risk it all so Jews would never again be defenseless.

From a Brooklyn street fighter to Israel’s first general since the Maccabees.

That’s the spirit that built the Jewish state.

[Congressman Mike Lawler @RepMikeLawler]

Yesterday, I led more than 90 colleagues in urging the Administration to dismantle the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and transition its responsibilities to transparent, accountable partners free from ties to terrorism.

The United States must ensure humanitarian aid supports peace, stability, and security in the Middle East, not organizations linked to Hamas.