by Stephen Lendman

Europe keeps sinking deeper into financial crisis. Eurozone straightjacket rules force 17 dissimilar countries to live by one size fits all diktats. Flawed planning preordained eventual disaster.

Monthly more systemic cracks emerge. Money creation alone prevents collapse. That game only works for so long.

An unstoppable slow motion train wreck promises to be ugly on impact. Too much damage was done to undo it. When it's coming who can know. Only Cassandra was good at forecasting. Her specialty, however, wasn't calling economic peaks and troughs.

Greece is most troubled. Conditions there go from bad to worse. Insolvency approaches in weeks without more cash. The more it gets, the greater amounts needed.

Read more »

Joey Ayoub

On the 16th of February, The Telegraph reported that Iran is "strengthening ties with al-Qaeda," according to "intelligence chiefs," in yet another report of Iran's secret ambitions. This is all too familiar for us Arabs. Ten years ago, Brian Whitaker wrote in The Guardian, "One of the oldest tricks in the run-up to a war is to spread terrifying stories of things that the enemy may be about to do. Government officials plant these tales, journalists water them and the public, for the most part, swallows them." This was the method used to justify the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The Sunday Herald reported in 2010, "Hundreds of powerful U.S. 'bunker-buster' bombs are being shipped from California to the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean in preparation for a possible attack on Iran." Britain expelled the citizens of Diego Garcia in 1966 so that the United States could build the massive base it uses for attacks in the Central Command area Democracy Now recently reported that "publicly, the British portrayed the establishment of the marine park as a move to save the environment. But a U.S. diplomatic cable dated May 2009, disclosed by WikiLeaks, revealed that a British Foreign Office official had privately told the Americans that the decision to set up a marine protected area would "effectively end the islanders' resettlement claims."

Read more »

By Khalid Amayreh

part II The Occupation

As mentioned above, even before 1967, the Israeli army had been carrying out routine incursions into the West Bank, destroying poor people’s homes and killing innocent civilians, very much like what Israel has been doing in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Lebanon.

I still vividly remember how the Israeli army, including tanks and warplanes, attacked the small nearby town of Sammou ’, 25 kilometres south-west of Dura, in November 1966, destroying the town, virtually completely, and killing many civilians. You see the condescending Zionist mentality. They are never interested in genuine peace and coexistence with the peoples of the Middle East, but are only intent on subjugating and tormenting people with brute force. This was as much the case 45 or even 60 years ago as it obviously is now. In the final analysis, a country that builds hundreds of colonies and transfers hundreds of thousands of its citizens to live on land that belongs to another people obviously doesn't have genuine peace at the top of its national agenda.

Read more »