Day: December 2, 2008

Judge rules that the jury in the Charles de Menezes murder cannot consider the killing as unlawful

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Dear Friends

As you may have heard in the news, the Coroner at the inquest into the police shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes has ruled that the jury cannot consider the verdict of unlawful killing. Instead he has ruled that they can only return a verdict of lawful or open.

As I write, lawyers for the Menezes family are in the High Court trying to challenge the Coroner’s decision. Due to legal technicalities we cannot comment on this at the moment but will be doing so in due course. Keep an eye on our blog for updates.

This morning as the Coroner started his summing up and the Menezes family and their supporters walked out of court in protest.

We await the outcome of our High Court challenge we we are hoping we can get that before the judges summing up finishes so the jury get the opportunity to return a verdict which reflects all the evidence.

Thanks for all your messages of support. Feel free to bombard the newspapers and press with comment.

Best

Yasmin
J4J Campaign

Africa Bound By William Bowles

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2 December 2008

F. William Engdahl’s essay on AFRICOM, ‘AFRICOM, China, and Congo Resource Wars’, prompted me to go through my archives and dig out a piece I wrote back in June of 2005, reproduced below, for it compliments the machinations of the imperial powers exposed in Engdahl’s essay as they attempt to extend their control of Africa’s vast resources by looking at how the Western ‘intelligentisa’ misrepresent Africa to us and in so doing supply the ammunition that justifies the existence of AFRICOM.

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Journalist Amira Haas Arrested entering Israel

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Dear friends,
Israeli journalist, Amira Hass has been arrested as she attempted to cross back into Israel from Gaza, after spending three weeks there (coming into Gaza on one of the Free Gaza Movement boats). Over the past few weeks, Hass has been filing on the ground reports from Gaza about life under the siege.

Hass, the child of Holocaust survivors, became the first and only Israeli journalist to be ever based in Gaza, moving there in 1993 to live and work. Today, she is still the only Israeli journalist to based in the Occupied Palestinian Territories moving to Ramallah in 1997. Three weeks ago, she once again became the only Israeli journalist to enter Gaza since the current illegal Israeli siege began, as not only has the Israeli military have prevented Israeli journalists for some time and recently also began preventing foreign journalists from entering Gaza.

Please find below the brief article on her arrest which appeared in the Haaretz, the paper she writes for.

In solidarity,
Kim
www.livefromoccupiedpalestine.blogspot.com
www.directaction.org.au

Last update – 16:44 02/12/2008

Haaretz journalist Amira Hass arrested for illegal stay in Gaza

By Tomer Zarchin, Haaretz Correspondent
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1042654.html

Haaretz correspondent Amira Hass was detained by Sderot police last night for having entered the Gaza Strip without a permit.

By order of the army, Israeli journalists have been barred from entering Gaza since the abduction of soldier Gilad Shalit in June 2006.

Hass was stopped by soldiers at the Erez Checkpoint, on the Gaza-Israel border, as she was returning to Israel from the Strip. Upon discovering that she had no permit to be in Gaza, the soldiers transferred her to the Sderot police.

When questioned, Hass pointed out that no one had stopped her from entering the Strip, which she did for work purposes.

Chief Superintendent Shimon Nahmani, commander of the Sderot police station, said Hass had entered Gaza by sea three weeks ago.

Hass was released under restriction, and Nahmani said her case will be sent to court in the coming week.

Israel Press Council chairwoman Dalia Dorner, a former Supreme Court justice, commented that even journalists are subject to the law and the council cannot defend a reporter who breaks the law. Instead, she said, local journalists ought to petition the High Court of Justice against the army’s order.

—
Greta Berlin
Media Team
Free Gaza Movement

William Blum: Anti-Empire Report, Number 64

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1 December, 2008

Vote First. Ask Questions Later

Okay, let’s get the obvious out of the way. It was historic. I choked up a number of times, tears came to my eyes, even though I didn’t vote for him. I voted for Ralph Nader for the fourth time in a row.

During the past eight years when I’ve listened to news programs on the radio each day I’ve made sure to be within a few feet of the radio so I could quickly change the station when that preposterous man or one of his disciples came on; I’m not a masochist, I suffer fools very poorly, and I get bored easily. Sad to say, I’m already turning the radio off sometimes when Obama comes on. He doesn’t say anything, or not enough, or not often enough. Platitudes, clichés, promises without substance, ‘hope and change’, almost everything without sufficient substance, ‘change and hope’, without specifics, designed not to offend. What exactly are the man’s principles? He never questions the premises of the empire. Never questions the premises of the ‘War on Terror’. I’m glad he won for two reasons only: John McCain and Sarah Palin, and I deeply resent the fact that the American system forces me to squeeze out a drop of pleasure from something so far removed from my ideals. Obama‘s votes came at least as much from people desperate for relief from neo-conservative suffocation as from people who genuinely believed in him. It’s a form of extortion – Vote for Obama or you get more of the same. Those are your only choices.

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Kobi Ben Simon: God’s Little Acre

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Reverse Settlement

[The article below by Kobi Ben Simon, from this weekend’s Haaretz, documents a phenomena that has become quite familiar, that of Jewish settlers moving into an Arab neighborhood of an Arab city, but with a twist. The implications for the future of Israel and Palestine are profound.

In this case, the city is Jaffa, part of the larger metropolis of Tel Aviv. The article identifies a process that is just at its beginning there, as the Rabbi, a former resident of a settlement in the occupied West Bank, established a yeshiva beachhead in the Arab neighborhood just a month ago. But similar processes are happening or have happened both in Israel and occupied Palestine. In Acre, which has been a target of Jewish re-settlement in recent years, there were violent clashes this year during and after Yom Kippur, which resulted in many Arab families being left homeless. In the Silwan neighborhood of East Jerusalem, where the process is a bit farther along, there are ongoing fierce efforts to “Judaize” the neighborhood, through faulty archaeological research, Jewish settlement and Palestinian Arab harassment and expulsion. And of course there is Hebron, where the settlers have already won, displacing the former vibrant center of Palestinian life with a ghost town fully controlled by the military where only the Jewish settlers can walk freely.

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Evo Morales on Climate Change: Save the Planet from Capitalism!

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‘Humankind is capable of saving the Earth if we recover the principles of solidarity, complementarity and harmony with nature in contraposition to the reign of competition, profits and rampant consumption of natural resources’

By Evo Morales Ayma,
President of Bolivia
From Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

November 28, 2008 — Sisters and brothers, today our Mother Earth is ill. From the beginning of the 21st century we have lived the hottest years of the last thousand years. Global warming is generating abrupt changes in the weather: the retreat of glaciers and the decrease of the polar ice caps; the increase of the sea level and the flooding of coastal areas, where approximately 60% of the world population live; the increase in the processes of desertification and the decrease of fresh water sources; a higher frequency in natural disasters that the communities of the earth suffer[1]; the extinction of animal and plant species; and the spread of diseases in areas that before were free from those diseases.

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