by Ismail Salami / July 19th, 2012
A new book reveals that a department known as Kidon within the Mossad has dispatched assassins into Iran in order to murder the nuclear scientists, thereby stunting the country’s nuclear energy program.
Authors Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman in their book Spies against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars state that the notorious spy agency has killed at least four Iranian nuclear scientists, including targeting them with operatives on motorcycles, an assassination technique used by the elite killers at Kidon.
The Kidon killers “excel at accurate shooting at any speed …
by Adam Engel / July 19th, 2012
It occurred to me a few weeks ago when I stupidly walked into the Strand Bookstore looking for a used copy of Mary Crow Dog’s Lakota Woman, only to be assaulted by huge, cinder-block tomes of the new giants of Mainstream Book-dealing, the Graphomaniacs, with laudatory graffiti penned by Times, Time, and Time-and-Again “reviewers” and odd and sundry professional blurbistas, that one of the worst realities about the murdering of literature — and it is certainly dead, according to autopsies by reliable, independent forensic technicians; i.e., those not “on the take” — is that “in the day” one could skate …
“This is How Duvalier Started”
by Meena Jagannath and Fran Quigley / July 19th, 2012
PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI — An unrelenting sun beats down on the streets of downtown Port-au-Prince, and sweat pours off the three dozen men and handful of women who sing, dance, and wave home-made signs as they block the entrance to the government Ministry of Social Affairs.
This is the latest in a series of weekly demonstrations by the grassroots organization MOLEGHAF, (Movement for Liberty and Equality by Haitians for Fraternity), calling for the government to create jobs and increase social support in this country with 80% unemployment and widespread poverty. Some of the signs read, MOLEGHAF Di Fók Nou Travay: …
by Press TV / July 19th, 2012
During the sixth anniversary of the July 2006 war, Hezbollah’s Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has warned Israel on any strike against Lebanon in the future and that Hezbollah’s resistance will have a big military surprise for them.
by Media Lens / July 19th, 2012
In January 2005, we described how the British media were united in celebrating Iraq’s ‘first free election in decades’. (Leader, “Vote against violence”, The Guardian, January 7, 2005)
The BBC’s main evening news reported “the first democratic election in fifty years” (BBC1, News at Ten, January 10, 2005). The Daily Telegraph wrote of “the first democratic elections” (Leader, “Mission accomplished”, Daily Telegraph, December 6, 2004). The Independent argued that “democratic and free elections can bring a hope of peace” (Borzou Daragahi, “Bin Laden backs deputy Zarqawi”, The Independent, December 28, 2004).
In their excellent book, Demonstration Elections (South End Press, 1984), …
by Gareth Porter / July 18th, 2012
IPS — The perception that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is threatening to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities unless sanctions and diplomacy succeed in shutting them down has been the driving force in the Iran crisis.
But although Netanyahu and Defence Minister Ehud Barak have made some tough statements, especially over the past several months, there is still one gaping hole in the record of their rhetoric on Iran: neither Netanyahu nor Barak has ever made an explicit public statement threatening to attack Iran.
And in recent months, both have refused to make anything like such a threat when invited to do so by …
by Ismail Salami / July 18th, 2012
Described as the Palestine of Asia by the UN, the Rohingya Muslim community in Myanmar is currently going through an unutterable ordeal at the hands of the Rakhine extremist Buddhists in Arakan who are targeting the Muslim minority with the worst form of religious cleansing.
Ethnic cleansing is rife in Myanmar and is turning into a human tragedy of colossal proportions. A confidential United Nations report dated May 29, 2011 and marked “Not for Public Citation or Distribution”, defines ethnic cleansing as a “purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian …
by Robert Hunziker / July 18th, 2012
The Age of Disruptive Climate Change, and its impact on the supply of food, is a major source of modern-day uprisings, toppling governments around the world.
The United States, “the breadbasket of the world,” and the largest exporter of corn, soybeans, and wheat, accounts for one in every three tonnes of staple grains that feed the world. Over the past month, futures prices for corn and wheat are up approximately 50%. The culprit behind this abnormal pricing behaviour is a major drought that is scorching one-half the breadbasket of America. The U.S. Department of Agriculture declared on July 11 that more …
by Joseph G. Ramsey / July 18th, 2012
That we work to defeat and to overthrow the rule of the 1% (and the 0.1%) over our lives, our society, and our world;
That we devote our lives to ending the oppression, domination, and exploitation of people both near and far;
That we defend what remains of public space and the public sector against neoliberal attempts to privatize or destroy it;
That we stand up for the freedom of speech and assembly, of dissent and public protest, as rights which no law-maker can revoke;
That we work for social equality: the radical redistribution of wealth, the transformation and/or abolition of oppressive institutions, the …
by Matthew Vickery / July 18th, 2012
In May, 2000 plus Palestinian prisoners ended possibly the largest hunger strike in history. It was a strike with dual purpose: raising awareness and halting the practice of administrative detention — the jailing of Palestinians with no trial and for no given reason — as well as obtaining basic human rights for detained prisoners. Just last week, Palestinian footballer Mahmoud Sarsak, who spent 3 months on hunger strike, ended his hunger strike and was released from prison.
Both strikes and others between have ended through deals which have resulted in some awareness of administrative detention, but no halt to it, …
by Max Mogren / July 18th, 2012
Glen Barry’s passionate recent article on climate collapse was great, but I believe he’s overlooking a major factor. Unchecked development, pollution, greenhouse gasses, etc. — all contribute to wacky weather and climate collapse but intentional weather modification (aka modern weather warfare) is the primary driver of the major uptick in extreme weather we’ve seen in the last few years.
Humans have been intentionally modifying the weather for over a century and in recent decades weather modification technologies have progressed on par with advances in communication technology to the point where they boggle the skeptical mind.
Geoengineering programs involving atmospheric …
Way cleared for annexation
by Jonathan Cook / July 18th, 2012
The recently published report by an Israeli judge concluding that Israel is not in fact occupying the Palestinian territories – despite a well-established international consensus to the contrary – has provoked mostly incredulity or mirth in Israel and abroad.
Leftwing websites in Israel used comically captioned photographs to highlight Justice Edmond Levy’s preposterous finding. One shows an Israeli soldier pressing the barrel of a rifle to the forehead of a Palestinian pinned to the ground, saying: “You see – I told you there’s no occupation.”
Even Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, seemed a little discomfited by the coverage last week. …
by Dave Lindorff / July 17th, 2012
Michelle Rhee, the former chancellor of Washington, DC’s public schools, has made a career for herself by inflating her resume, dodging responsibility, and trashing teachers. Now, two years after leaving her DC post under a cloud after the mayor who appointed her, Adrian Fenty, was defeated in a re-election bid in which her own contentious tenure was the main issue, she is at it again.
Rhee, a shameless self-promoter who already stands accused of lying about her alleged success as a teacher of elementary students, and who continues to be the subject of a US Department of Education investigation into a …
Gold Rush Overrides Human Rights
by Ramzy Baroud / July 17th, 2012
The widespread killings of Rohingya Muslims in Burma – or Myanmar – have received only passing and dispassionate coverage in most media. What they actually warrant is widespread outrage and decisive efforts to bring further human rights abuses to an immediate halt.
“Burmese helicopter set fire to three boats carrying nearly 50 Muslim Rohingyas fleeing sectarian violence in western Burma in an attack that is believed to have killed everyone on board,” reported Radio Free Europe on July 12.
Why would anyone take such fatal risks? Refugees are attempting to escape imminent death, torture or arrest at the hands of the Ethnic …
by Ismail Salami / July 17th, 2012
Preposterously bizarre as it is, the head of MI6 foreign intelligence agency John Sawers made a rare appearance before Britain’s civil servants in London on Friday and warned that the Iranians are “determinedly going down a path to master all aspects of nuclear weapons; all the technologies they need,” and that they will by 2014 acquire a nuclear bomb.
Apart from his political fallacy concerning Iran nuclear energy program, he smugly owns up to the MI6 covert operations in Iran which the British government had denied for years. The superspy’s confession to MI6 covert operations in Iran comes at a …
Walking Two Dogs into the Oblivion of What it is to be an American Yankee-Doodle Dandy (ruminations after the rockets red blare)
by Paul Haeder / July 17th, 2012
Energy In, Energy Out-sourced
I’m thinking about energy these days. Oil, tar sands, the amount put into Homo industrious‘ lifestyle and wars for extraction. All the globalized harvesting of proteins from the collapsing seas. Forests cut down for soy beans. Millions of acres of grass prairie torn up to fuel cattle and cars.
Japan is giving the green light to ratcheting up their Fukishima-based economic growth model. More nuclear energy, at what cost? Shell Oil drilling in the Arctic and Australian/Canadian mining firms pushing into all of Latin America.
It’s the small stories on National Petroleum-Pesticide-Pharmaceutical Radio (NPR) …
by Graham Peebles / July 17th, 2012
An ideological poison is polluting all life within Ethiopia, flowing into every area of civil society. Local governance, urban and rural neighbourhoods, farming, education and the judiciary all are washed in Revolutionary Democracy, the doctrine of the ruling party. Human Rights Watch, (HRW) in their detailed report, “Development without Freedom” (DWF) quotes Ethiopia’s Prime Minister for the last twenty years, Meles Zenawi, explaining that:
When Revolutionary Democracy permeates the entire society, individuals will start to think alike and all persons will cease having their own independent outlook. In this order, individual thinking becomes simply part of collective thinking because the
…
The Spectre Confroning Neoliberals and Pseudo-Marxists
by Arun G. Mukhopadhyay / July 17th, 2012
Karl Marx (1818-1883) was certainly one of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century. Marx accused capitalism as the source of growing inequality between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ in his theory of historical materialism. In crafting a novel world-view, Marx’s scholarship deconstructed the inner functioning of capitalism and its contradictions. Marx envisioned that these contradictions would obviously endanger the waning social order. But Marx had failed to accommodate properly some of his brilliant ecological ideas in his emanicipatory project which engendered ambiguities. Alex Night in his November 2010 article observed that Marx’s primary flaw was his blindly …
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / July 16th, 2012
by Matt Reichel / July 16th, 2012
In a rather imprudent attempt at provocation by lefty commentator Alexander Cockburn on the Counterpunch site last week, he declares the Occupy movement dead while lambasting the movement: “There were .. features that I think quite a large number of people found annoying: the cult of the internet, the tweeting and so forth, and I definitely didn’t like the enormous arrogance which prompted the Occupiers to claim that they were indeed the most important radical surge in living memory.”
I have personally always enjoyed his prose, owing largely to …
