URUK Net 9 March, 2010: Video: Settlers pouring cement into spring
#Gaza1000: 1000 Days of The Israeli Siege on Gaza
Mohammad Badi
March 9, 2010 – Today, Gaza completes the day No. 1000 of the Israeli siege and the disaster is eating the land and the citizens of Gaza. All of that was because they didn’t want to leave their lands, they didn’t give up to the settlers who wants to occupy their land, they said loudly, NO for Israel and no for the occupation!… Israelis, the most professional criminals in the world have stopped the support for Gaza, they even denied medications to enter Gaza Strip! The Palestinians in Gaza were suffering and they still suffering from the lack of the least requirements of life that anybody needs to live. A continuous and daily misery hitting the citizens. Stresses, sicknesses are all are working together and killing the citizens so slowly, and the disaster still increasing over and over, giving citizens noway to survive. Siege gives only 2 choices die or live and the first choice is very easy but the second one is totally hard…
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Decade Of The Drone: America’s Aerial Assassins
Rick Rozoff
March 9, 2010 – 2010 is the last year of the new century and millennium and is the tenth consecutive year of the United States’ war in Afghanistan and in the 15-nation area of responsibility subsumed under Operation Enduring Freedom. In early March American military deaths in the Greater Afghan War theater -Afghanistan, Cuba (Guantanamo Bay), Djibouti, Eritrea, Jordan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, the Philippines, Seychelles, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Yemen – surpassed the 1,000 mark…
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Media Blackout on Agent Orange
Coverage ignores effects on Vietnamese victims
By Dave Lindorff
March 9, 2010 – In mid-October, hundreds of thousands of Vietnam-era veterans got some good if grim news: The Veterans Administration announced it was adding three more diseases to the 11 others it automatically presumes to have been caused by exposure to Agent Orange, the dioxin-laced herbicide spread by the U.S. military across much of South Vietnam to deny crops and cover to North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters during the war. Newspapers and radio and TV news programs across America ran stories announcing that veterans of the jungle war who now suffer or may eventually suffer from Parkinson’s Disease, ischemic heart disease or a type of cancer called hairy-cell leukemia will henceforth automatically be offered free medical care by the VA if they’d spent at least one day in uniform on the ground in Vietnam…
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Video: Haitians still desperate for help
Aljazeera.English
March 9, 2010 – Two months after a massive earthquake killed hundreds of thousands of people in Haiti and left the Caribbean island in ruins, the country’s president travelled to the US seeking billions of dollars in aid. Rene Preval’s visit comes three weeks before donor nations meet at the United Nations in New York to map out a multi-billion dollar reconstruction plan for Haiti…Back in Haiti, more than a million people are still in desperate need of immediate help.
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Dispute over candidate disqualifications could mar Iraqi vote’s legitimacy
By Ernesto Londoño and Leila Fadel, WP
March 19, 2010 — A controversy over the disqualification of candidates threatened Tuesday to undermine the legitimacy of Iraq’s recent elections and inflame supporters of a coalition seeking to topple the alliance led by the prime minister. U.S. officials, who had deemed the elections historic, were growing increasingly concerned by the dispute Tuesday evening, fearing it could lead to violence… If the votes for the newly barred candidates are annulled, it could give the Iraqiya coalition powerful ammunition to allege vote-rigging by rival politicians, including some in the Shiite-led camp of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. “It will be a very violent reaction,” Allawi said in an interview Tuesday. “A lot of violence will take place, and God knows how this will end. I will tell you there is already an existing feeling that there was widespread rigging and widespread intimidation.”…
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Kairos and Lent in the ‘Holy Land’
By Timothy Seidel
March 9, 2010 – Experiencing the Lenten season in Palestine is unique. It carries with it incredible feelings of closeness and concreteness as one visits sites such as the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in the Old City of Jerusalem—the site where Christians believe Jesus Christ was crucified, buried and resurrected. Yet, those feelings of closeness are easily swallowed up by a sense of separation and forsakenness as one considers the current situation. In the recently released “Kairos Document,” Palestinian Christians take this situation as their starting point in challenging theological interpretations of those “who use the Bible to threaten our existence as Christian and Muslim Palestinians,” trying to “attach a biblical and theological legitimacy to the infringement of our rights.” …
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Battle over Iraq candidates’ Baath links heads for courts
Loveday Morris
March 9, 2010 – Ahmed Chalabi and Ali al Lami, the men responsible for the purge of hundreds of candidates with Baathist links from the Iraqi elections, said they are taking the country’s Independent Higher Electoral Commission to court in a bid to have votes for 55 candidates voided. Mr Chalabi and Mr al Lami dominate the controversial Accountability and Justice Commission, in charge of the country’s de-Baathification process, which handed down an order to ban 511 candidates just weeks before the election… The pair, both affiliated with the Shiite-dominated Iraqi National Alliance coalition, have been accused of working with a sectarian agenda to marginalise Sunni candidates and take out political rivals in collaboration with Nouri al Maliki, the incumbent prime minister…
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Does Israel hope to spark a new wave of suicide bombing?
Stuart Littlewood
March 9, 2010 – Here in the civilised West we hate suicide bombers with a passion. We’re taught that the proper way to blow fellow humans to smithereens is to do it from 40,000 feet. Or failing that, send Apache helicopter gun-ships at street level firing their laser-guided missiles and 30mm cannon. Or failing that, turn loose our main battle tanks to shred and vaporize the “enemy”, reduce their homes to rubble with DU shells and spread birth defects for generations to come. Nowadays we don’t even have to leave home to do it. We can train our really brainy chaps to steer armed drones to the target from the comfort of an armchair…
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Gates visits Afghanistan to prepare US offensive against Kandahar
By Joe Kishore
March 9, 2010 – US Defense Secretary Robert Gates made an unannounced trip to Afghanistan on Monday to discuss preparations for a major military offensive against Kandahar, the country’s second largest city. At a joint press conference in Kabul with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Gates warned of a new round of bloody violence against the Afghan people. “People do need to understand there is some very hard fighting and some very hard days ahead,” he said. “I worry people will get too impatient and think things are better than they actually are.” The US is in the midst of a “surge” in southern Afghanistan, under the direction of the Obama administration. The main target will be Kandahar, a city of some 900,000 people and the birthplace of the Taliban…
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The Business Of Water – Privatizing An Essential Resource
By Stephen Lendman
March 9, 2010 – In her 2002 book titled, “Water Wars,” noted author, social activist, and ecologist Vandana Shiva called privatizing water: — ecological terrorism; — a global water crisis; — along with overuse, waste and pollution, it can cause “the most pervasive, most severe, and most invisible dimension of the ecological devastation of the earth;” — the road to “an ecological crisis with commercial causes but no market solutions; (they) destroy the earth and aggravate inequality; the solution to an ecological crisis is ecological, and the solution for injustice is democracy;” and — water rights are natural and “usufructuary…water can be used but not owned;” it belongs to everyone as part of the commons as an essential “basis of all life…under customary laws, the right to water has been accepted as a natural, social fact.”…
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UPDATES: 2 & 3 ON IRAQ’S ELECTIONS
Layla Anwar
March 9, 2010 – … URGENT : JUST GOT THIS IN NOW ! IRAN HAS ASKED INA (IRAQ NATIONAL ALLIANCE) TO FORM ALLIANCE WITH MALIKI STATE OF LAW COALITION. IRANIAN AGENDA TO CHOOSE JAAFAR BAQER EL SADR AS P.M AND MALIKI WILL PLAY SECONDARY ROLE— MORE TO COME… MALIKI HAS INFORMALLY ASKED KURDS TO FORM ALLIANCE WITH ABOVE BLOC AS PER IRANIAN AGENDA… Am I a seer or am I a seer ?! Reminder of partition plan : South, Center and North…
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Alternative reading of Hamas murder
By Ramzy Baroud
March 9, 2010 – The killing of Palestinian activist Mahmoud al-Mabhouh on January 19 was clearly a well-planned act, committed by Israeli assassins in the supposed safety of a sovereign country, Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Yes, Mabhouh was a Palestinian activist. We have no reason to believe otherwise. He spent years of his life in Israeli prisons – and one year in an Egyptian jail – for his political activism. This, however, gives no credibility to Israel’s accusation that Mabhouh was a killer of Israelis. This assertion becomes even more problematic when considering that Mabhouh’s assassination was, according to British media, ordered by Israeli rightwing politicians.
According to the Sunday Times, Meir Dagan, the current director of Mossad, briefed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the assassination plan during a meeting in early January. “The people of Israel trust you. Good luck,” Netanyahu reportedly said at the end of this meeting…
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My Name Is Ed. I’m a Racist
Ed Kinane
March 9, 2010 – …The flipside of this (necessary but insufficient) standard is our widely held, but rarely examined, notion of anti-racism. Again, we “know” we’re anti-racist because, in my case for example, back in the eighties we organized against South African apartheid. Or because recently we contributed to Haiti earthquake relief. But such notions of racism/anti-racism don’t go deep enough. It takes work to fathom racism’s breadth and subtlety and to perceive the social and economic forces fostering the de facto segregation that warps our social fabric. Equally essential, we must recognize and resist the racism pervading U.S. foreign policy. The Pentagon’s current military adventures – whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia — were foreshadowed, in the 19th century, by relentless Indian wars and by U.S. invasions of Mexico and the Philippines…
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Hopeful Signs in Iraq?
Robert Dreyfuss
March 9, 2010 – …Some initial thoughts: voter turnout was 62 percent, according to initial reports from Iraq. That’s down from about 75 percent in the 2005 election. In Baghdad, the key province with 70 seats in parliament at stake, turnout was the lowest in Iraq, at 53 percent. It isn’t clear, yet, if that total includes any or all of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who fled Baghdad during the sectarian purge of 2005-2007, mostly Sunni voters who either fled to Syria and Jordan or to safer provinces in western Iraq. According to initial reports, again, election officials at polling places were ill-equipped to handle displaced voters, meaning that many internally displaced persons didn’t get to vote. If the election is close, and perhaps even if it isn’t, the disputes over the votes of refugees and displaced persons will be bitter and explosive…It’s also too early to evaluate the impact of the pre-election purge by Iran’s friends in Iraq, including Ahmed Chalabi, who prevented hundreds of secular, nationalist, and anti-Iranian candidates from running for office…
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Totalitarian Democracy?
The Crackdown on Israeli Dissidents
By CONN HALLINAN
March 9, 2010 – A heavy-handed crack down on Israeli dissidents is drawing sharp criticism by human rights organizations and at least a mild judicial slap on the wrist for the government of Benjamin Netanyahu. The authorities are targeting such groups as B’Tselem, New Israel Fund (NIF), the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), as well as foreign activists in the occupied West Bank. “There is an attempt to silence and crack down on dissent,” B’Tselem spokeswoman Sarit Michaeli told the Tobias Buck of the Financial Times. “Since [the Gaza war], the political climate in Israel has become extremely polarized. And this polarization has reached a level where anyone who is critical is presented as a traitor.”…
Read the full article: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=64009
Witnesses: Israeli official attempts Sheikh Jarrah home takeover
Ma’an News
March 9, 2010 – Israeli Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem David Harari attempted to forcibly enter the Sheikh Jarrah home of Rifqa Al-Kurd on Tuesday morning, but was halted by a number of Jerusalemites, Fatah’s Jerusalem affairs chief Hatem Abdul Qader said. Reports from residents say Harari was in the area on a solidarity visit with the settlers, and was exploring the possibility of taking over part of the Al-Kurd home for an office…
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In Israel, Biden says U.S. dedication to nation’s security is ‘absolute’
By Paul Richter
March 9, 2010 – Vice President Joe Biden on Tuesday began an effort to heal strained ties with Israel, pledging a total U.S. commitment to Israel’s security and declaring that the bonds between the nations were “unbreakable.” Opening a day of consultations with Israeli leaders, Biden also promoted indirect peace talks, set to begin soon, saying they offered “a moment of real opportunity” in the search for a settlement between Israelis and Palestinians. Biden, the highest-ranking administration official yet to visit Israel, was dispatched by President Obama to try to restore Israeli confidence in the American government that has deteriorated over the last year…
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New suspect named in Dubai assassination
Sophie Tedmanson
March 9, 2010 – The 27th suspect wanted over the assassination of a Hamas leader in his luxury hotel room in Dubai earlier this year has been named by Interpol, which issued arrest notices yesterday for an additional 16 people in connection with the killing. The international police agency issued red notices, its highest-level alert, for a 16-strong team accused of shadowing Mahmoud al-Mabhouh before his killing. It had already issued notices for 11 other suspects last month…
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Video: Settlers pouring cement into spring
ISMPalestine
March 9, 2010 – A group of Israeli settlers destroy a spring by the village of Qarawat Bani Hassan in the Salfit district of the occupied West Bank. Palestinian villagers were forced to watch helplessly as settlers poured sand and cement into the spring, guarded by five armed members of the Israeli military…
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Q&A:’Israeli Siege Causing De-development of Gaza’
David Cronin interviews MAHMOUD ABU RAHMA, Gazan human rights worker
David Cronin
March 8, 2010 – …Most people think that the siege of Gaza, the blockade, started in June 2007. But I would say that the blockade started in June 1967. The first Israeli military order after the Six-Day War announced that the Gaza Strip was a unit and the West Bank was another unit and that they were two closed military zones. No one was allowed to leave or to enter these zones without a special permit from the Israeli military authorities. Now, this has not changed. I came here, with a special permit from the Israeli authorities. So it still applies. It is true that in June 2007, Israel announced that Gaza was a hostile entity. They cancelled what is known as the custom code, so no imports can go directly to Gaza. We don’t exist anymore on the economic map. The siege has been stepped up since then and it is hitting the population very hard…
Read the full article: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=64003
NY Firm’s Credit Cards Used In Hamas Leader Hit
Jen Chung
March 9, 2010 – As expected, the investigation into a Hamas leader’s assassination in Dubai now involves U.S.-based credit card companies. One of those companies is Payoneer, a firm on Park Avenue which has a research and development center in Tel Aviv. The AP reports that it called Payoneer’s Tel Aviv office and “got a recording listing extensions, but when these were pressed, there was only dead air.”…
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