Commemorative voyages to Auschwitz.

Online Journal

The British government has introduced compulsory lessons on the Holocaust for school children and is funding school visits to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland to the tune of 1.5 million sterling pounds, to be topped up by a further 4.65 million sterling pounds. That the “unimaginable suffering” of the Holocaust must never be forgotten was Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s personal message on Holocaust Memorial Day.

Conservative leader David Cameron wrote-off the school trips as just another government “gimmick” and is now being hounded by ministers, Jewish groups and the media to apologize.

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Peace and Freedom Be with You, God’s beloved Palestine.

No one earth can possibly imagine what our beloved Palestinians, especially those in Gaza, are enduring or feeling every day and every night of their lives under the brutal illegal and evil occupation by Israel, an Apartheid Zionist state forcibly imposed on an indigenous population by colonial powers who today proclaim themselves the guardians of democracy, freedom, human rights and the military exporters of liberty to an Arab world they mapped and installed autocratic puppeteers.

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This article discusses the potential health risks of genetically engineered foods (GMOs). It draws on some previously used material because its importance bears repeating. It also cites three notable books and highlights one in particular - Jeffrey Smith's "Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods." Detailed information from the book is featured below.

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This is a note from an American radical. We are few in number, but we do exist.

Time and again we’ve watched you bully your victims (or “guests” as you duplicitously refer to them) from your secure little perch high atop the food chain of craven and mendacious propagandists dutifully maintaining the pernicious lies that perpetuate the moral retardation and turpitude of this nation. You are a truly despicable human being. And by the way, Bill, characterizing you as a human being is a sign of our generosity and open-mindedness.

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“The Lady doth protest too much, methinks. “ - William Shakespeare

It pains me to agree with that ranter Richard Cohen of the Washington Post. But, every once in a while, like that insufferable Neocon, Jonah Goldberg, he gets it right. On Feb. 25, 2008, Cohen ripped Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY), a veritable new you-know-what. At the moment, she running very badly for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Her negative, attack-dog campaign tactics are also dragging the party down with her. Cohen, sensing exactly how vulnerable she is, took his knife out and sharpened it to a razor’s edge. In his hatchet job, entitled “Hillary’s Diminishing Returns,” he drove the knife, deeply, into Clinton, puncturing, again and again, her hyper inflated political ego. Cohen’s Coup de Hillary is this stinger: “The harder she works, the worst she does.”

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© Steve Bell

Index Research

1. Prologue: Robicheaux's Nightmare

What would James Lee Burke’s alterego, Dave Robicheaux, have to say about the cast of characters in this evil story of kidnapping, prison and torture? Does the alleged mastermind, Dick Cheney, go to jail for war crimes? Does his mouthpiece, the President, tag along or go back to Texas oil territory and revision his place in history? What happens to the judges, the PNACers, the lawyers, the corporate elite, and all other 'gumballs' in this disgusting sham of “democracy and freedom?” Who will deep-six them?

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"Palestinians can be killed without outrage"

Palestinian Chronicle

Once again, we are learning that when it comes to the conflict in Palestine/Israel, some lives are worth more than others. Earlier today, dozens of Qassam rockets fired from the Gaza Strip fell on Sderot, the Israeli town that has borne the brunt of Palestinian rocket fire over the last few years. This time, an Israeli man, “father-of-four” Roni Yechiah, was killed in a car park by shrapnel. Others have suffered injuries.

Even as I write this, however, there is news that in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military, in separate attacks, has killed a 6 month old baby and three Palestinian children age 10, 12 and 14. No names yet. In the case of the three children, the Israeli army claims that it was aiming at militants, and a spokesperson said it was “strange” that there should be children around the alleged vicinity of rocket launchers.

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Were they lying then
Are they lying now
Are they not chronic and habitual liars?

As the cover-ups and lies and abductions and transcontinental trafficking to torture continued the British government came out this week saying they are sorry, disappointed and embarrassed. It stirs the Yank’s response to the Brit in The Third Man: "Is that all you say when someone dies! ‘Ah, that’s awkward’?"

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Never have so many hoped for so much because of rollicking rhetoric and pulsating platitudes. A tsunami of hope has plunged America into electoral euphoria. In its path is the wreckage of critical thinking about what ails the US and what bold, revolutionary actions are needed. Barry Obama has accomplished semantic alchemy, turning justified but grim distrust and outrage with government and politics into hallelujah hope. But most hope never materializes and is a terrible predictor of reality.

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"Inferno" by Gustave Doré

Smoking Mirrors

Last year nearly a third of the American bees left their hives and went...somewhere. It’s being said even more will disappear this year. A third of your food supply depends on these bees. Fruits, vegetables and nuts are all at risk. Slipping into the news we see that much higher food prices are on their way all over the world.

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"forbidden thoughts..." © rcafrix

Online Journal

I recently had a conversation with a person I'll just call "a successful writer," and when I mentioned an idea that he classified as "conspiracy theory" he said this: "The trouble with conspiracy theories is that they really take a toll on readership. Many people write you off as a conspiracy nut and the result is that you don't get to have your voice in the mainstream dialogue." Now that gave me pause. It was a slap in the face that forced me to confront the question: Why write?

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[Illustration] © Needled

WSWS

The demise of a 58-year-old unemployed man who deliberately starved himself to death in a remote hideout in the woods is both a personal tragedy and a devastating indictment of the current state of German society. It says more about conditions in Germany than all the pious speeches of professional politicians and academic studies into poverty and unemployment.

The emaciated body of Hans-Peter Z was discovered two weeks ago, in a forest area near Solling in Lower Saxony. It is estimated that Hans-Peter Z had already been dead for over two months. According to a police report he died after not eating for 24 days and drinking only a little water, while documenting his suffering in a diary.

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ETC Group

The Global Seed Vault Raises Political / Conservation Debate

Issue: The opening of the Global Seed Vault in Norway’s high Arctic February 26 closes a 30-year campaign for a World Gene Bank – and opens an overdue debate on the State of the World’s Plant Genetic Resources and the need to support on-farm conservation strategies.

Stakes: Less than a third of the 6 1/2 million seed samples now in storage are probably unique. Of these, perhaps two-thirds are in urgent need of regeneration. While the Global Seed Vault is a step in the right direction, many vital ex situ gene banks are in desperate straits. As much as half of the world’s crop diversity may still be in farmers’ fields protected only by the family and the community – who are up against industrial agriculture, plant patenting, global trade rules, corporate concentration and climate change. Global food security depends upon a coherent in situ (on-farm) and ex situ (gene bank) strategy.

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On Sunday 17 February 2008 the first phase of Iran's oil and petrochemical bourse in Kish Island was inaugurated, paving the way for "all major currencies of the world" to be used in future oil transactions. To understand the significance of this event, let's take a look back at our history, starting with World War I. The following short video (2:08) recaps the events that resulted in Britain landing troops in Iran in 1914, and consequently occupying Iraq. A more detailed and glorified recollection of these events can be witnessed through one of the greatest epic movies of all time, 'Lawrence of Arabia'.

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Global Research

Bill Gates, Rockefeller and the GMO giants know something we don’t.

One thing Microsoft founder Bill Gates can’t be accused of is sloth. He was already programming at 14, founded Microsoft at age 20 while still a student at Harvard. By 1995 he had been listed by Forbes as the world’s richest man from being the largest shareholder in his Microsoft, a company which his relentless drive built into a de facto monopoly in software systems for personal computers.

In 2006 when most people in such a situation might think of retiring to a quiet Pacific island, Bill Gates decided to devote his energies to his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest ‘transparent’ private foundation as it says, with a whopping $34.6 billion endowment and a legal necessity to spend $1.5 billion a year on charitable projects around the world to maintain its tax free charitable status. A gift from friend and business associate, mega-investor Warren Buffett in 2006, of some $30 billion worth of shares in Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway put the Gates’ foundation into the league where it spends almost the amount of the entire annual budget of the United Nations’ World Health Organization. So when Bill Gates decides through the Gates Foundation to invest some $30 million of their hard earned money in a project, it is worth looking at.

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Signs of torture on Majd al Barghouthi's legs

The Palestinian Information Center (PIC)

Comment by Khalid Amayreh in Ramallah

A government that murders its political opponents, by way of torture or assassination, and then tries to cover up the crime, or mitigate its gravity, is a criminal government, pure and simple.

As Palestinian citizens, we are worried that the Ramallah-based government is effectively becoming just another Arab police state, to be added to the other 22 other police states in the Arab world. But there is a very a conspicuous difference, because in our case, the Palestinian “state” is obviously a police state without a state.

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[Rio Grande, Albuquerque. This photo shows the shore of the Rio Grande in Albuquerque. You see a sampling of the appealing fall colors as trees prepare for winter in the bosque. The Manzano mountain range can be seen in the background. This is as seen from the Central Avenue Overpass near the Rio Grande Botanic Garden. This was shot at aproximately 4:45 in the evening in early November, 2005.]

CounterPunch

Apache land owners on the Rio Grande told Homeland Security to halt the seizure of their lands for the US/Mexico border wall on January 7, 2008. It was the same day that a 30-day notice from Homeland Security expired with the threat of land seizures by eminent domain to build the US/Mexico border wall.

"There are two kinds of people in this world, those who build walls and those who build bridges," said Enrique Madrid, Jumano Apache community member, land owner in Redford and archaeological steward for the Texas Historical Commission.

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"Islamic fanaticism, like its American, and Christian counterpart, thrives on the
disenfranchised, the downtrodden, the ignorant, and in those searching for meaning to
lives heavy in suffering and pain."

Barbarians At the Gates

From the very beginning, the American crusade of surge and siege – with much of it predating the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; think to early 20th century agreements with Saudi royalty of protection for petroleum, or the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected nationalist leader, or CIA coups and installing of tyranny, or support for Saddam, or provocations of war, or fanning the flames of violence, or importation of billions worth of weapons – has been a catastrophe for the people of the Middle East. For years the United States has guided policy and fates in the region, with its unchallenged domination of and immoral support in the regimes of the Middle East causing a complete devolution of a dynamic, intelligent and proud amalgam of peoples, continuing a stagnation of a civilization that has given humanity so much, and which has so much yet to offer.

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Iraqi mother

Through Middle East Eyes

In order for the peoples of America and the West to understand what has been and is currently being done to the peoples of the Middle East we must envision ourselves as human beings living and going through life in that most troubled of regions. We must exercise a humanist form of empathy that places us squarely inside the lands of desert and sand, the lands of the people of the Bible, of terrain full of mirages and complexities, of alien and unfamiliar cultures and languages and religions, of a history that predates any western beginning or thought, of a complexity we know almost nothing about.

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“A lie would make no sense, unless the truth were felt to be dangerous.” - Carl G. Jung

Philip Shenon’s insightful “The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation,” is a book that I found hard to put down. An investigative reporter for the NY Times, he gives a detailed history of the so-called “official” inquiry, authorized by the U.S. Congress, into the tragedy of September 11, 2001. One of the central characters in this compelling saga is a master manipulator, Philip D. Zelikow. He ran the Commission as its Executive Director. The idea that this guy, who had close ties to Condi Rice, was interested in revealing the full truth about 9/11 is simply preposterous. Why? Because, he had co-authored a book with Rice, worked on President Bush’s transition team in 2000/2001, and wrote a Neocon-like policy paper, which was used to justify the horrific Iraq War. Zelikow should have had the words “Conflict of Interest” branded on his Neocon-loving forehead!

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Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR)

When Hassan Sheikh Hijazi first opened his flower farm in 1991, it flourished. "We had a very good family business," he says. "We exported hundreds of thousands of flowers to Holland – and from there our flowers were sold across Europe. The traders knew our flowers were good quality - and Gaza was open for business."

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PACBI.org

It's all About Justice: Don't Honor Israel!

The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) has learned that you have been invited by Israeli President Shimon Peres to take part in a conference designed to mark Israel's contributions to medicine, science, and conservation. We urge you, as a prominent activist on issues of global inequality and a campaigner for basic human rights, to say no to Israel, especially since the invitation coincides with celebrations marking the 60th anniversary of the founding of the state. With the creation of this state sixty years ago, “Palestine ceased to exist except in the hearts and mind of Palestinians,”[1] of whom three quarters of a million were dispossessed and uprooted from their homes and lands, condemned to a life of exile and destitution.

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The human race must learn to be more than just cattle. We move like a herd, we think like a herd, we are controlled like a herd. We are about to be stampeded into thousands of slaughterhouses, just like the end of all livestock herds.

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Marjayoun's most recent tragedy occurred on August 11, 2006,
when Israeli forces took control of the town

Marjayoun, Lebanon

"The difference, my dear Christian friends, between Israel and the Arab world is quite simply the difference between civilization and barbarism. It's the difference between good and evil and this is what we're witnessing in the Arabic and Islamic world. I am angry. They have no SOUL! They are dead set on killing and destruction. And in the name of something they call "Allah," which is very different from the God we believe in, because our God is the God of love."

—Brigitte Gabriel, speaking at John Hagee's Christians United for Israel Convention, July 27, 2007

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In the early months of the Aqsa intifada against the Israeli occupation, an Israeli officer in the Nablus region told dozens of handcuffed and blindfolded Palestinian detainees that “we are treating you like the Nazis treated us, and maybe when you are free from our grip, you will find another people whom you will treat the same way we are treating you.”

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Rense

Humpty-Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty-Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
couldn't put Humpty together again.

Today in America, we are witness to a great unraveling, the likes of which we have never seen before. There are no historical precedents. For many months now the official narrative about the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on America has been coming apart, and I mean: at the seams. The official story about that terrible day is disintegrating. The trend shows no sign of abating and in recent weeks it even appears to have accelerated. At the present rate, soon there will be nothing left of the official version of events but a discordant echo and a series of extremely rude after shocks. Is our nation prepared to face those rude shocks?

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General George Washington

I am not one of those disciples of the state, nor that student of politics, that offers that the United States Constitution is “the greatest document ever written.” My choice would be instead, the Declaration of Independence. It was the Declaration that cleverly transferred the power of Divine Right from a nation’s monarch to each and every single, solitary citizen of a nation. It was that document that established and reaffirmed John Locke’s “life, liberty and property” as the human means by which we can all enjoy the Creator’s gifts. It was the Declaration that established government as an artificial entity, one whose only purpose was to guarantee individual human freedom, and that when government fails in this regard, citizens had a right to abolish it and to create a better one to replace it.

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I turned on a TV set yesterday to catch the news. The first choice was a CNN channel because they do only news 24 hours daily. The talking head that appeared on the screen was solemnly declaring he was about to discuss 'a very serious matter' concerning actions by Barrack Obama.

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(Ben Heine © Cartoons)

Desert Peace

The puppet regime set up by Mahmoud Abbas in the occupied West Bank is worried… worried that the truth of the occupation and the reasons behind it might be leaking out to the West.

Abbas would like the West to believe that he is the legitimate leader of the Palestinian people…. trying desperately to hide the fact that he and the ‘government’ he (and Israel) set up is nothing more than a kapo regime established only to serve the interests of Israel, the occupier.

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Palestinian child shot dead by IOF troops during an incursion
into Deir al-Balah on 19 Feb. 2008

The Palestinian Information Center (PIC) / Desert Peace

Comment by Khalid Amayreh in Occupied E. Jerusalem

For the past few weeks, I made strenuous efforts to reach a dignified ceasefire in the Gaza Strip in coordination with some peace-minded Jews. Our goal was to save lives and prevent further escalation, and give the starved and thoroughly-tormented people of Gaza a respite from daily killings and bombings by the Israeli occupation army.

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Palestinian Committee Against Siege (PCAS)

Millions of people in the participating countries of the Global day for Gaza Strip lived in darkness for 5 minutes in solidarity of with poor besiege people.

Around 86 cities and towns involved in this step to help the civilians in the Gaza strip.

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Angela Garbarino

I grew up believing 'police officers' were sworn to 'protect and swerve'. Since the GOP believes it has installed a dictator, the US has become 'Thug Nation', defending and practicing torture abroad while, at home, cops run wild and out of control. They apparently believe that martial is a 'done deal' though Bush's prediction --a terrorist attack that will make 911 'pale by comparison' --hasn't yet come to pass!

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Existentialist Cowboy / [Index Research]

The Bush administration had planned to commit war crimes from the outset of the administration. Long before 911, Bush prepared legislation that would exempt US troops from war crimes prosecution at the Hague, specifically, violations of the Geneva Conventions later violated in fact at Abu Ghraib. The measure positioned Bush in advance to exploit the crime of 911, though it had not yet happened. To this end, Bush sought Congressional authorization to go to war with the Netherlands should US troops find themselves on trial for war crimes at the Hague!

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The current outsourcing and downsizing of manufacturing in the U.S. will eventually lead to fascism if past history is a dependable predictor of the future. A decrease in the contribution of a country's manufacture to its trade balance will lead to large trade deficits causing a drop in the value of a country's currency. When this occurs, an accompanying decrease in the living standard of its citizens will result in political unrest leading to the establishment of a political state under the control of a powerful ruling class. The U.S. is currently in experiencing the beginning stage of this process.

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Xymphora

The recent human rights commission involvement in the activities of the Canadian minions of Zionism has revealed some contradictions between the Zionist propaganda developed in the 1960s, and the Zionist propaganda developed in the 1980s. The 1960s propaganda was developed to provide an excuse for the planned program of massive crimes against humanity and war crimes that it was anticipated would be required in order to build the Zionist Empire (the first concrete step of which was the annexation of territory in 1967, which is why Holocaust obsession started in the early 1960s).

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The video obtained by Hope Steffey's lawyer and released to the public represents only a fraction of Hope's actual torture by the Stark County sheriffs department in Ohio. The video is difficult to watch, but it's very important for people, particularly Americans, to know that this outrageous crime has taken place in their country. The legal outcome of this case could determine what kind of country the United States becomes. If this level of injustice and brutality towards American citizens by their own law enforcement agencies and legal system is condoned and not corrected, the real possibility of humiliating and painful torture exists for all Americans.

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Senator John McCain has only one issue with the chance of uniting the Republican base and presenting a challenge to the Democrats in the General Election – war and more of it.

Senator McCain describes the “war” against “Islamic extremism” as the “transcendent challenge of the 21st century.” He describes Iraq as a war the U.S. must win and has promised there are “more wars to come.” He supports the use of military force against Iran, even singing about bombing Iran jokingly. And he has described the U.S. stay in Iraq as something that could last 100 years and be fine with him. Pat Buchanan says that “McCain makes Cheney look like Gandhi.”

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WebSiteToolBox.com

Consortium News

In 1976, when George H.W. Bush was CIA director, the U.S. government tolerated right-wing terrorist cells inside the United States and mostly looked the other way when these killers topped even Palestinian terrorists in spilling blood, including a lethal car bombing in Washington, D.C., according to newly obtained internal government documents.

That car bombing on Sept. 21, 1976, on Washington’s Embassy Row, killed Chile’s former Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and an American co-worker Ronni Moffitt, while wounding Moffitt’s husband. It soon became clear to the FBI and other federal investigators that the attack likely was a joint operation of DINA, the fearsome Chilean intelligence agency of military dictator Augusto Pinochet, and U.S.-based right-wing Cuban exiles.

But Bush’s CIA steered attention away from the real assassins toward leftists who supposedly killed Letelier to create a martyr for their cause. Eventually, the CIA’s cover story collapsed and – during the Carter administration – at least some of the lower-level conspirators were prosecuted, though the full story was never told.

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Chicago Tribune

ROCK ISLAND, Ill.—Inside the stout federal courthouse of this Mississippi River town, the dirty secrets of Iraq war profiteering keep pouring out.

Hundreds of pages of recently unsealed court records detail how kickbacks shaped the war's largest troop support contract months before the first wave of U.S. soldiers plunged their boots into Iraqi sand.

The graft continued well beyond the 2004 congressional hearings that first called attention to it. And the massive fraud endangered the health of American soldiers even as it lined contractors' pockets, records show.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDe65-nF3FQ&eurl=http://sabbah.biz/mt/
http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/1676.htm
http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/1676.htm

Following are excerpts from an interview with American Political Scientist Norman Finkelstein, which aired on Future TV on January 20, 2008. The questions were posed in Arabic, and Finkelstein’s responses are in English.

Norman Finkelstein: I was of course happy to meet the Hizbullah people, because it is a point of view that is rarely heard in the United States. I have no problem saying that I do want to express solidarity with them, and I am not going to be a coward of a hypocrite about it. I don’t care about Hizbullah as a political organization. I don’t know much about their politics, and anyhow, it’s irrelevant. I don’t live in Lebanon. It’s a choice that the Lebanese have to make: Who they want to be their leaders, who they want to represent them. But there is a fundamental principle. People have the right to defend their country from foreign occupiers, and people have the right to defend their country from invaders who are destroying their country. That to me is a very basic, elementary and uncomplicated question.

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Pakistan's most important election...

On February 19, 2008, Pakistan's largest English language daily Dawn and the world press identically reported in a story boldly headlined “Indian official warns over Pakistan nukes”, that: “The nature of the dangers which nuclear weapons pose has dramatically intensified with the growing risk that such weapons may be acquired by terrorists... The mounting concern over the likelihood that in a situation of chaos, Pakistan’s nuclear assets may fall into the hands of jihadi elements ... underscores how real this danger has become ... India has to be deeply concerned about the danger it faces”.

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On January 10, Swiss-based Manas Petroleum Corporation broke the news. Gustavson Associates LLC's Resource Evaluation identified large prospects of oil and gas reserves in Albania, close to Kosovo. They're in areas called blocks A, B, C, D and E, encompassing about 780,000 acres along the northwest to southeast "trending (geological) fold belt of northwestern Albania."

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Rohatyn

The now rapidly accumulating evidence of a European plot to establish a fascist dictatorship over western and central Europe, when this ongoing activity is compared with the fascist plot led by the cabal gathered around New York's Mayor Bloomberg, and around traditionally fascist figures such as George Shultz and Felix Rohatyn of Pinochet regime notoriety, makes it fair to say that an immediate threat of an international fascist coup d'etat is currently in full swing in both the U.S.A. and western and central Europe. It is only during this month that the implications of this trans-Atlantic fascist plot have exposed themselves as a clear and present immediate danger to civilization world-wide.

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After Downing Street

In a packed hearing room on Feb 19th, under a carved wooden sign reading “Live Free or Die”, the New Hampshire House committee of State-Federal Relations and Veterans’ Affairs heard testimony on Representative Betty Hall’s HR 24, which calls on the U.S. Congress to begin impeachment hearings for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

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Crowds attending an Israel solidarity rally in Trafalgar Square in
2002. (Photograph: Graham Turner/Guardian)

The Guardian

The full extent of government anxiety about the state of British-Israel relations can be exposed for the first time today in a secret document seen by the Guardian.

The document reveals how the Foreign Office successfully fought to keep secret any mention of Israel contained on the first draft of the controversial, now discredited Iraq weapons dossier. At the heart of it was nervousness at the top of government about any mention of Israel's nuclear arsenal in an official paper accusing Iraq of flouting the UN's authority on weapons of mass destruction.

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Xymphora

Hate crime laws have been used for years in Canada to suppress the extremely rare instances of right-wing hate you might find in Canada (when I say rare, I'm talking about maybe a couple dozen people in a country of about 30 million). The entire weight of the Canadian state is brought to bear on some losers, typically owners of 'neo-Nazi' websites containing Holocaust denial, sites seen by a handful of people at most. From a practical point of view, completely harmless ranting.

=> Read more!

The Bush administration did not rebuild New Orleans. It occupied it. When normal folk looked at New Orleans they saw a picturesque, beautiful, culturally unique city. When the GOP looked at New Orleans, it saw Disneyland and Las Vegas! Certainly, the brutal Blackwater occuption of New Orleans was but a foretaste of an epitdemic of police thuggery and brutality that now sweeps the US.

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Darwish Addassi on a walk near his home
in Walnut Creek, CA.

The Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU)

Darwish Addassi wishes his fellow Americans could spend a day in his shoes. Maybe then they would know what it feels like to be a refugee. The 74-year-old retired chemist still remembers the day he was expelled from his home 60 years ago and became a refugee. Addassi has not been back to Lydda, Palestine since.

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CounterPunch

Across this last weekend, the Western propaganda machine was working overtime, celebrating the latest NATO miracle: the transformation of Serbian Kosovo into Albanian Kosova. A shameless land grab by the United States, which used the Kosovo problem to install an enormous military base (Camp Bondsteel) on other people's strategically located land, is transformed by the power of the media into an edifying legend of "national liberation".

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"The legend of Vanunu continues to grow"

Click here to view the latest Vanunu Video
(Requires Windows Media Player)

View the video on google by clicking here.

On February 19, 2008, Vanunu wrote: The court hearing today Feb. 19, was again postponed, because of a small snow here. We are waiting for the next hearing date soon.

On July 2, 2007, an Israeli court sentenced Vanunu, to six more months in jail for violating a ban imposed on him in 2004, forbidding him to speak to foreigners. Two days before President Bush landed in Tel Aviv and a day before Vanunu's appeal was to begin, Israel sentenced him to community service instead.

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Since the Bush administration took office in January 2001, it's targeted Hugo Chavez relentlessly. From the aborted two-day April 2002 coup attempt to the 2002-03 oil management lockout to the failed 2004 recall referendum to stoking opposition rallies against the constitutional reform referendum to constant pillorying in the media to funding opposition candidates in elections to the present when headlines like the Reuters February 7 one announced: "Courts freeze $12 billion Venezuela assets in Exxon row." Call it the latest salvo in Bush v. Chavez with ExxonMobil (EM) its lead aggressor and the long arm of the CIA and Pentagon always in the wings.

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(The guy in the background is the second Secretary-General of the
United Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld.)

FOX News

How big do you have to be to earn the wrath of the United Nations and Internet giant Google?

If you're journalist Matthew Lee, all it takes are some critical articles and a scrappy little Web site.

Lee is the editor-in-chief, Webmaster and pretty much the only reporter for Inner City Press, a pint-sized Internet news operation that's taken on Goliath-sized entities like Citigroup since 1987. Click here to view the Inner City Press Web site.

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(Courtesy Paramount Pictures)

New York Times

A popular video on YouTube shows Kellie Pickler, the adorable platinum blonde from “American Idol,” appearing on the Fox game show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” during celebrity week. Selected from a third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000 question asked: “Budapest is the capital of what European country?”

Ms. Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard perplexed. “I thought Europe was a country,” she said. Playing it safe, she chose to copy the answer offered by one of the genuine fifth graders: Hungary. “Hungry?” she said, eyes widening in disbelief. “That’s a country? I’ve heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I’ve never heard of it.”

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Illustration: OnoClothing

Lew Rockwell

Government rips an autistic boy from his home because it prefers a different treatment than the one offered by the parents.

What kind of society rips a 17-year-old autistic boy from his loving home and places him in a state-run mental institution, where he is given heavy doses of drugs, kept physically restrained, kept away from his family, deprived of books and other mental stimulation and is left alone to rot?

Certainly not a free or humane one.

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Hear No Evil, See No Evil

Americans’ ever-enduring, catatonic sleepwalk through the Empire’s vast array of bread and circus, as always produced by the Ministry of Truth and the Department of Propaganda, better known as the corporatist media, has succeeded in the creation of an ignorant, incurious and dumbed down populace completely bereft of knowledge of what is done in its name. With no concern for or understanding of geography, cultures, history, alien societies, the outside world and of the imperial aspirations of the Empire, Americans have proved easy targets to the manipulations and deceptions of the corporatist world. Seemingly unwilling to gain knowledge of anything outside American Idol or the weekly NASCAR rat race, the soldier ants and worker bees of the Empire are content to circumvent the horrors of war and the myriad crimes against humanity committed in their name in order to maintain their beautiful minds at peace.

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Homeland Born and Bred

Sojourn into the outer recesses of a nation bordering on madness, into a land deeply disturbed and emotionally bewildered, a world of anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism, of fanaticism and fundamentalism, entering a case study into fantasyland and escapism, taking a pilgrimage into realms both of purposeful ignorance and blindness, , of electing lifelong incompetents based on wanting to have a beer with them, walking through the dark valley of indifference, climbing the monolithic mountain of hubris, finally reaching the hallowed halls of smoke and mirrors, a place where only the blind lead the blind and where the deafening roars of death and destruction are easily suppressed in delusion and denial. Journey, if you will, into a nation that lost its moral compass inside the dungeons of fear and hatred.

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Governments’ “Cost of Doing Business” betrays Olympic Principles

The Olympic Summer Games go back to Athens: 1896. For the first time in its history the Summer Games this year will be hosted by the Peoples Republic of China. In the summer of 2001 the International Olympics Committee meeting in Moscow elected Beijing the “Host City for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad in 2008.”

Now, months after the IOC chose China, and in the midst of China’s overwhelming superiority in trade and monetary maneuvering; some people have begun to question China’s compliance with the Spirit of The Olympics and whether Beijing should have been chosen at all.

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“The healthy man does not torture others.” - Carl G. Jung

“Turncoat Joe” Lieberman is full of surprises. The other day, Feb. 14, 2008, the hawkish U.S. Senator from Connecticut said that waterboarding “is not torture!” He added, however, that it should be permitted “only under the most extreme circumstances” Well, let’s see... personally, I don’t like Barbara “BaWa” Walters. She gets on my nerves, whining so much about everything. I wouldn’t mind seeing her waterboarded on ABC TV’s “The View” program. But, heck, I’m only kidding. Sen. Lieberman isn’t! He’s dead serious! He tried to defend his Marquis de Sade-like tendencies by saying: “Waterboarding is mostly psychological and there is no permanent physical damage.” (1) How does he know what physical and mental effects it has on a victim? Has he ever been waterboarded?

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American press called it market reform but as for the citizens of
Russia, this was no different than criminal act.

In her book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein defines the term “disaster capitalism,” as an organized attack on the public sphere during a major collective trauma where the disasters open up “exciting market opportunities.” She has laid out numerous incidents where the fear and disorder from a crisis, whether it’s war or natural disaster, act as the catalysts for radical social and economic changes where the free market rises. Rather than repairing what was destroyed in a disaster, the disaster capitalists finish cleaning up what was left of the public sphere and original communities, and then replace them with private corporations. The idea behind the economic shock treatment is supported by Milton Friedman’s idea of ultimate freedom in capitalist society.

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The Palestinian Information Center (PIC)

Est-ce que Sarkozy est un Sioniste extraordinaire? -Is French President Nicolas Sarkozy an extraordinary Zionist? Well, his behavior so far indicates that he is.

Last week, Mr. Sarkozy was quoted as saying that he wouldn’t shake hands with anyone that didn’t recognize Israel as a Jewish state. The gravity of his statement is very real, since accepting Israel as an exclusively Jewish state amounts to condoning and embracing racism in its most fundamental forms. It is very much like insisting that France should belong exclusively to the Catholics and that the non-Catholic citizens of France would have to come to terms with their inferior status as lesser citizens who eventually would have to choose between embracing Catholicism or expulsion.

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[RE: Illustration above] The Jewish Impact Films Fellowship was established by leading Hollywood producers to empower the next generation of young Jewish thinkers to use creative media, specifically short internet-based films, to effectively communicate new messaging about Judaism and Israel. (www.jewishimpactfilms.com)

Xymphora

Philip Weiss describes the Jew-control of the American media, a subject so toxic that it evokes gales of slurring from the benighted American chattering classes, who would apparently rather see the American Empire collapse in an orgy of Wars For The Jews rather than admit the truth.

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Che Guevara sez: "Let me say, at the risk of
seeming ridiculous, that the true
revolutionary is guided by great feelings of
love." If Che was right, comrades: It's time
to start showing the world some radical love.

"I never met another man I'd rather be. And even if that's a delusion, it's a lucky one."

Q. How many liberals does it take to ward off a potential attacker in a dark alley? A. Ten

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Wikileaks.org / Psyche, Science & Society

One of the most important web sites in recent months has been Wikileaks.org. Created by several brave journalists committed to transparency, Wikileaks has published important leaked documents, such as the Rules of Engagement for Iraq [see my The Secret Rules of Engagement in Iraq], the 2003 and 2004 Guantanamo Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures, and evidence of major bank fraud in Kenya [see also here] that apparently affected the Kenyan elections. Wikileaks has upset the Chinese government enough that they are attempting to censor it, as is the Thai military junta.

=> Read more!

Creative-I

The ‘news’ programmes explain much about US capitalism’s ability to block out the reality of the situation, with virtually no coverage of the world beyond the US, even the obscenity which is the US occupation of Iraq gets no mention at all, nor even the sub-prime mortgage crash, they simply don’t exist. You have to read the ‘quality’ newspapers like the New York Times to even see it mentioned, never mind explained (the latest stat put the total number affected at around 100 million which seems a staggering number and if true must surely spell a social disaster of gargantuan proportions). But the only disasters allowed are the ‘small’ personal ones, murders, rapes and robberies, these are after all, events that everyone can relate to, or the inevitable natural ones, some of which are actually anything but natural).

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As the race for the United States presidential nominations progresses, the stances of and attitudes towards both Republican and Democratic candidates continue to bring up causes for concern, in terms of their past behaviour, current appeal and general trustworthiness.

=> Read more!

The Palestinian Information Center (PIC)

Comment by Khalid Amayreh in Occupied E. Jerusalem

There is no doubt that the cold-blooded extermination by the Israeli air-force of an entire Palestinian family in Gaza on Friday, 15, was a monstrous crime not unlike Nazi atrocities during World War II.

The only difference lies in the fact that the Nazis did it “wholesale” while their ideological descendants, the Zionists, are doing the same thing by retail.

What else can be said about the deliberate and premeditated bombing from high altitudes of a residential home and the annihilation of a man, his wife and their three children who were asleep in the dead of night?

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Online Journal

If you type the phrase "concentration camps" into your Internet search engine, you will find page after page of references to martial law and the construction of concentration camps in the United States on behalf of the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

A close examination reveals that many of these references lack sufficient facts to support their conclusions; however, taken as a whole, there is an abundance of factual information showing an alarming trend in the deployment of federal and military forces to restrain and detain American citizens.

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Jack booted thugs can now arrest you without a warrant, without "probable cause" or evidence that you might have committed a crime. Law abiding Americans are victimized by cops gone wild, sadistic hot dogs, mental midgets and Nazi wannabes. They are inspired by the atmosphere of fear and hate. Police atrocities are to be expected.

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A close reading of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Federalist Papers tells us the founders were envisaging a democracy in which all arbitrary barriers to self growth and development for all citizens would be scuttled or restrained. The term 'self realization' had not yet appeared, but they were nonetheless discussing it. The right to a fulfillment of one's inherent capacities was a right of every member of a truly democratic society according to their theories regarding what a truly democratic society would look like.

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Even Fayyad admits there are no peace prospects...

As sounds of the drums of war coming from Israel are getting louder and louder, Palestinian Authority (PA) leaders are showing growing signs of impatience with the slow-moving talks with Israel.

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While claiming to be attempting to increase the number of well-paying jobs in the U.S. (having created laws in the past explicitly designed to do this), the Congress has really been following a completely different course. Almost all recently passed laws have done just the opposite.

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Four years ago, I wrote "Why I Will Not Vote In 2004" for which a number of readers thanked me profusely while another segment of readers sent scathing emails questioning how I could be so cynical and unpatriotic.

My intent in writing that article was not cynicism but honest questioning and exposure of what the voting process in this nation has become in recent years.

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Hope mongering has been working much better than experience mongering. Now, the rest of the story….

As befits American culture, politics is all about slick selling to the masses. Hillary Clinton is selling Day-1 help to victims and sufferers. Barack Obama is selling effervescent hope to yes-we-can dreamers. This media hyped horse race is like a fight between diet Coke and diet Pepsi, artificially sweetened candidates devoid of real nourishment.

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(Tell-Tale Map)

It should be apparent that the problem in Palestine is not just simply a problem of checkpoints, human rights abuses, the wall, home demolitions, the architecture of occupation or even the siege of Gaza; the core of the problem is the illegal theft, colonization and occupation of a whole country.

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“Be the change that you want to see in the world.” - Mohandas Gandhi

The late Philip Berrigan, Dissenter Emeritus, wrote in 1997: “The empire’s wars are killing us.” (1) One of the big props for that empire is the clique in our society, known as the “Military-Industrial Complex.” This is the same powerful special interest that President Dwight D. Eisenshower warned the nation about in his “Farewell Address.” (2) Peace activist Berrigan felt, as a result of the arms race, that the world was moving towards a nuclear holocaust. In any event, Professor Francis A. Boyle’s new book, “Protesting Power: War, Resistance, and Law,” reveals how some courageous individuals have successfully challenged the many outrageous, and ongoing, crimes of our national regimes, via their arrest in a Civil Resistance-type action, and, subsequently, as a defendant in a court of law before a jury of their peers.

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When Hermann Hesse warned of the rise of fascism in Germany he was rejected by a majority of the population. The truth is that most people were experiencing first hand the benefits of fascist ideology. Today we look at that part of our global history with shame, asking ourselves how something like Auswitch could be allowed to happen. The problem is that while we identify it in our past, we are reluctant to acknowledge it happening in our present.

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In his recent book, Where Have All the Leaders Gone?, Lee Iacocca talks about the performance of leaders across society and asks, “Where the hell is our outrage?” And he asks if he’s the only person in the country who’s fed up with what’s happening. Lee, you are not the only one. I am outraged, as are many others, and our expression of it is long overdue. Unless we demand more of our leaders, they will not deliver more, and unless they deliver more, we are collectively a snowball headed for a hot place.

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Photo art - blackagendareport.com

The presidential campaign of Barack Obama has become a media parade on its way to a coronation. Journalists and leading Democrats have done shockingly little to pin Obama down, to hold him specifically responsible for anything beyond his slogans of "yes we can" and "change we can believe in". Prominent Black Democrats, many ministers and the traditional Black leadership class are doing less than anybody to hold Obama accountable, peddling instead a supposed racial obligation among African Americans to support this second coming of Joshua and his campaign as "the movement" itself. What would holding Barack Obama accountable on war and peace, on social security, health care and other issues look like, and is it possible to hold a political "rock star" accountable at all?

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What the Western allies face is a long, sustained and proactive defence of their societies and way of life. To that end, they must keep risks at a distance, while at the same time protecting their homelands.

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Bumpersticker: Now in Stores

Desert Peace

The wall of Apartheid in Israel has made it virtually impossible for many Palestinian workers to cross over to the Israeli side for work purposes. This has resulted in a mass influx of foreign workers, especially those that work as caregivers for the old and sick of the nation. Hundreds of thousands of these people are in Israel today, most with valid visas, many who are here illegally.

The tales they tell are unbelievably shameful and expose yet another aspect of the racism inherent in zionism…. I’ll deal with just one of these stories in this post, but keep in mind that this is just one of a thousand of such examples…

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Online Journal

According to Gideon Polya, based on UNESCO data, the US invasion of Afghanistan has led to as many as 6.6 million unnecessary deaths. According to Washburn University law professor Liaquat Ali Khan, the “crime of genocide applies to the intentional killings that NATO troops commit on a weekly basis in the poor villages and mute mountains of Afghanistan to destroy the Taliban.” The occupation forces, which ironically include former Axis powers Germany and Japan, have created the New Auschwitz.

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The Palestinian Information Center (PIC)

For the third consecutive day, hundreds of Israeli occupation soldiers and agents of Israel’s chief domestic security agency, the Shin Bet, are savaging and terrorizing this small Palestinian town of 10,000 inhabitants, located just a few kilometers north of Hebron in the southern West Bank.

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From Tom Paine's Corner

(Rome) It is a paradox that the Americanism of which Americans are so proud is the source of the pandemic anti-Americanism throughout the world. Precisely the same Americanism of which Americans boast generates a worldwide antipathy toward them. And today, not just toward the US government, but in many places—to begin with in Iraq, as testified by blog writers from there—that antipathy, that hate, is directed against Americans in general.

“We hate Americans!”

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When the truth is too horrible to acknowledge, then it becomes very easy to believe in a series of lies instead. If the truth is that our leaders are really monsters, who have purposely manufactured a planned genocidal world war, in order to preserve America’s fading position in the world, then the truth becomes almost impossible to believe.

It is difficult to believe, but there are some people who were shocked to learn that White House spokesmen issued 935 documented falsehoods to lie us into the Iraq war.

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Man walks outside a money-changing office in Nablus which
was raided by the IOF Monday night

Comment by Khalid Amayreh in occupied E. Jerusalem

Is there a real difference between a criminal state and a criminal individual? Is there a difference between classical gangsters and armed robbers who hold-up people and steal their money at gunpoint, and a state, which claims to be the only democracy in the Middle East and a light upon the nations of the world, that commits very much the same crime?

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5th in A Greater Awakening Series

"Where there is no vision, the people perish."-Proverbs 29, 18 - King James Version

The ancients understood that God spoke to them in their dreams and visions. The ancients told those stories around the camp fires and those stories grew by the flame enkindled in the hearer's hearts; transforming them into story tellers too.

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“Obama’s campaign...may be creating...a powerful constituency for ‘real’ change.” - Dave Lindorff, political pundit

Sen. Barack Obama’s vote-generating juggernaut came very close to burying Sen. Hillary Clinton’s presidential aspirations in Maryland’s primary, on Feb. 12, 2008. Clinton’s candidacy in the “Free State” was aligned with its powerful Democratic Party Political Machine, while Sen. Obama was forced to reach out to the grassroots. In the Clinton camp, was the senior U.S. Senator from Maryland, Barbara Mikulski. She is seen by some as an appeaser of the Bush-Cheney Gang, particularly on the Iraq War. Clinton also had in her corner the state’s Governor, Martin O’Malley. His popularity, however, is sinking faster than the value of the U.S. dollar. His administration recently pushed through some very unwelcomed tax hikes. “Bubba Bill” Clinton also made an appearance or two on his wife’s behalf. Alas, it was all to no avail, as the final results indicated. Sen. Obama carried Maryland by a whopping 60% to 37%--with a margin of about 180,000 votes.

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Popular Committee Against Siege (PCAs)

The mainstream media reported that Israel will resume its fuel deliveries to Gaza, but they forget to mention that it will deliver only 20% of the amount necessary to the Gaza needs.

Israel has also announced that on February 7, it would reduce by 5% its electricity supplies to Gaza where power is severely lacking.

In Gaza, the humanitarian situation is still dramatic.

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© Ben Heine

Desert Peace

Why was the following hushed up until recently???

George Bush’s grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany. The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.

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Woodrow Wilson held a Ph. D. but wasn’t bright enough to restrain his bad judgment in supporting the Federal Reserve System and its guarantee of citizen reimbursement via the unconstitutional income tax. And as he failed in this, in spite of all his marvelous and outstanding education, and couldn’t see through the international bankers’ plan to enslave American government and its people, he failed to see also the benefits provided by a strict adherence to the United States Constitution and the combined genius of the Founding Fathers.

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The British Fabian press chose the occasion of Super-Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2008, to make clear to the world what Lyndon LaRouche had been warning for weeks: Democratic Presidential hopeful Barack Obama can be politically destroyed by scandal on a moment's notice. Both the Guardian and the Independent published detailed stories on Obama's ties to jailed political fixer and slumlord Antoin "Tony'' Rezko, one of the earliest political and financial backers of the Illinois Senator's meteoric rise to political prominence.

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Ard El Insan Child Nutrition Centre in Gaza city treated
almost 8,500 malnourished youngsters last year.

Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR)

"We receive 20-25 new referrals every day, and we see approximately three hundred and fifty children a week here at the centre. Last year we treated more than eight thousand four hundred children here in Gaza city, plus another eight thousand children at our centre in Khan Yunis. All of them were under 5 years old, and all of them were malnourished."

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(Yes, it most certainly will, just as sure as people in Hell want Ice water)

If tiny bubbles floating up from the ocean floor could tell tales, we might learn a thing or two on the surface. On the heels of Iran announcing the grand opening of its new 'Oil Bourse,' not many US financial institutions are cutting colorful ribbons or breaking Champaign bottles in celebration over this announcement. In fact, Wall Street is painfully developing acid reflex because this could very well be the beginning of the end for monopolizing 'Texas Tea' exclusively being sold using only American dollars. In truth, this could very well plummet the American dollar deeper into the abyss of nothingness. Having said that, strange things are surreptitiously happening on the ocean floor with scant reporting in the US corporate mainstream news media...sneaky little devils.

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London Progressive Journal

In January 2007, the Iraq Solidarity Campaign informed the international community about the damage which the growth of poverty has caused to the children of Iraq, through the much- publicised paper "Western Civilisation - The Unspoken Fate of Iraqi Children".

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I lost my child today
People came to weep and cry
as I just sat and stared, dry eyed
They struggled to find words to say
to try and make the pain go away
I walked the floor in disbelief
I lost my child today.

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FreakingNews.com

Creative-I

O-Bummer – the man without a past for a country without a future

Harlem, NYC — That both a black man and a woman are the ‘front runners’ in the ‘race’ for the presidency speaks reams about the desperate state of the Union these days, not that the up-coming US election has much relevancy to anything of import but the illusion that voting every five years is a reflection of real democracy, has to be maintained.

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Cartoon by Rory O'Donnell

Lew Rockwell

Ah, the Nazis. Modern America knows few epithets more vile. You can insult a man’s mother, wish rape on him, liken him to the hinder part of the alimentary canal. But don’t compare him to Germany’s totalitarians, even if he works for their contemporary counterparts, unless you want a fight – and a frisk from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

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American corporations have been moving their export-oriented jobs overseas and will not be hiring American workers until differential wage rates decrease substantially. U. S. wage rates, as well as EU wage rates, are considerably above the wage rates of those of workers in Asia. What is called for now are international minimum wage and working standards.

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Online Journal

President Bush has been to Las Vegas nine times since he was first inaugurated, but last Wednesday was the first time he ever stayed overnight in Sin City. He and his aides (and the traveling press corps) did so in luxury, staying at the Venetian, the palatial casino resort run by Sheldon Adelson, the chairman of Las Vegas Sands Corp. and a big force in GOP and philanthropic circles. (He is part of the money behind Freedom's Watch, the conservative foreign policy group formed as a kind of counterpoint to liberal groups like MoveOn.org.) Adelson and his wife, Miriam, were in the loading dock at the Venetian Thursday to greet Bush and jumped into his limousine to ride with him to his speech sponsored by a conservative think tank.

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CIA/Connections to Yale's Skull and Bones enable the Bush dictatorship. Bush has decreed his "long term plan" for Iraq, committing the US, without Congressional authority, to a permanent presence. His decree is a poke in the eye to the public, the congress, the rule of law! Bush believes himself to be above the rule of law, the authority of Congress and the courts. When England was confronted by Charles I, a monarch who likewise presumed to be above Parliament, the English simply marched Charles out onto an improvised platform at the Banqueting House in Whitehall where they proceeded to chop off his head!

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Israeli border police take position during a protest against the Israeli
wall in the West Bank village of al-Khader, 8 February 2008. (Luay
Sababa/MaanImages)

Electronoc Intifada

"The next logical step" for the Israeli government "will have to be a decision whether to target the top political leadership" of Hamas. So said an Israeli official quoted in The Jerusalem Post. Tzahi Hanegbi, a senior member of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's Kadima party and chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, echoed the call, arguing that "There's no difference between those who wear a suicide suit and a diplomat's suit." Following a cabinet meeting on 10 February, Israel's Interior Minister Shimon Sheetrit specifically called for the execution of Ismail Haniyeh, the democratically-elected Hamas prime minister, and added that for good measure "We must take a neighborhood in Gaza and wipe it off the map."

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F. William Engdahl is a leading researcher, economist and analyst of the New World Order who's written on issues of energy, politics and economics for over 30 years. He contributes regularly to publications like Japan's Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Foresight magazine, Grant's Investor.com, European Banker and Business Banker International. He's also a frequent speaker at geopolitical, economic and energy related international conferences and is a distinguished Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization where he's a regular contributor.

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There is a crisis occurring in American politics.

The American people’s confidence in our government is gone. Only 25% of Americans are satisfied with the state of their country. We are growing alienated from the Democratic and Republican parties, which are dominated by ideologues who offer simplistic solutions. Their members care only about election and reelection, and how to frame issues to benefit their status within their party. At the same time, voters are craving real solutions to the real problems we face – affordable health care, the war on terror, energy independence, the environment, jobs and national security. This gap between the voters’ needs and what the two parties actually provide only grows with the uncertainty that surrounds the 2008 presidential race, as the economy heads towards recession.

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There once was a very arrogant president who loved power, war, and the finest clothes. After taking office following a bitterly contested election, he would awake each morning wondering how he could gain even more power, greater authority, go to war, and what he would wear that day. “Good morning Mr. President,” his Secretary of State would say. “Your people need better housing, food, schools and cheap gas. How do you plan to help them?”

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"Israel has created a worse system of apartheid than anything that ever
existed in South Africa according to Archbishop Desmond Tutu"

"If I can't dance, it's not my revolution."- Emma Goldman

In 1965, The Beatles were banned from playing Israel by the authorities for fear they would corrupt the minds of Israeli youth.

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Diversity has given way to only two distinct opposites: respect for the individual versus respect for the state. Our nation was created to protect the sanctity of the individual; for freedom, namely the individual’s inherent right to life liberty and property, can only be enjoyed by the individual.

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RINF.com

It is hard to pick a place to start in terms of talking about the most outrageous lies that the Bush administration and the 9/11 Commission have presented to the people in this country as a reason to attack Afghanistan and Iraq and to launch a “fake war on terror”.

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Heaven and Hell lI, 1991, Alkyd and Oil on canvas (Collection
of Carmen Lomas Garza)

The Ugly Truth

A holy man was having a conversation with the Lord one day and said,

‘Lord, I would like to know what Heaven and Hell are like.’

The Lord led the holy man to two doors.

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"On February 1st, only a few minutes apart, two Iraqi women detonated themselves in two crowded
pet markets in the Iraqi capital."

In the competitive world of media today, swift and conveniently selective reporting is of prime importance. Google News, for example, claim to scan 4,500 news sources, of which only a few are highlighted as main stories. There are thousands of similar services, all competing to produce a story in the fastest time. Thorough - and thus slower - reporting is relegated and crucial information often appears too little too late.

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Instead of taking a firm stand against Israel’s Nazi-like criminality in Gaza and other Zionist covert efforts to destabilize and weaken Egypt, the Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmad Abu al Ghait reportedly lashed out at the Palestinians recently, vowing that Egypt would “break the legs of those who would cross the borders again.”

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Gilad Atzmon & Mary Rizzo

To all the friends of the freedom of speech and opponents of racism:

We are a group of Palestinians and other activists for the Palestinian cause of various nationalities and affiliations, and believe that unity and persistence is important to confront the injustice our people had suffered in the past and still at present, probably in the unforeseeable future by Zionist and colonialist powers.

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"Kucinich was visited by representatives of Nancy Pelosi and the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee, the right wing Israeli lobby. They told him that if he would drop his campaigns to
impeach Cheney and Bush, they would guarantee his re-election to the House of
Representatives. Kucinich threw them out of his office."

Former Presidential Candidate Who Advocated Peace and Impeachment Facing Well-Financed Challenge at Home

On the Hill some call it being McKinney’d – the treatment Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney received when she was in Congress. Twice, rather than protecting the incumbent, the Democrats put up well funded challengers against her. Now, it looks like Dennis Kucinich may be facing the same treatment in Cleveland.

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Ralph Nader

As a life-long activist in the labor, peace and social-justice movements, I’ve watched with amazement, wonder, and exhilaration as the American people gave us the most surprising primary races in decades; and that was just the first month! We have eight months to go and undoubtedly many surprises yet to come.

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Back in the first century, the Roman poet Juvenal, in his 'Satire X', wrote a poem with lines which have forever remained famous and have been endlessly repeated. His satirical poem ridiculed the Roman people for letting their freedoms dwindle and slip away as they contented themselves with the free grain that was given to them in addition to the free circuses held in the Coliseum.

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America has passed – it is actually beyond categorization as “dead on arrival”! American government defies open accountability. It defends oligarchic agendas and deceives often all Americans. America has long been relegated to the ash heap of history and is in the final stages of decomposition. The so-called press is part and parcel of the oligarchy and exists only to ensure their agenda of a power elite-dominated New World Order.

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"They manipulate our minds and beliefs, program our thoughts, divert our
attention, and effectively destroy the free marketplace of ideas essential to
a healthy democracy they won't tolerate. None more ruthlessly than
Murdoch and the infoentertainment empire he controls."

For Big Media, truth is a scare commodity and in times of war it's the first casualty, or as esteemed journalist John Pilger noted: "Journalism (not truth) is the first casualty (of war). Not only that: it('s)....a weapon of war (by its) virulent censorship....by omission (and its) power....can mean....life and death for people in faraway countries, such as Iraq."

=> Read more!

Palestinian Committee Against Siege (PCAS)

The slow genocide is still under way in Gaza! Act Now!

We were all pleased to see a new wall tear down, but unlike the Berlin Wall, this does not mean that the occupation is over and Gazans are free.

Egypt closed the border back and the 5 days of freedom the Gazans courageously allowed themselves by demolishing the walls of their prison didn't allow them to erase 6 months of blockade, without medicines, without drinking water, without electricity, without fuel, without food balanced, without freedom.

=> Read more!

Crimes & Corruptions of the New World Order

Today, more than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public does—and, at least on one occasion, before elected officials. In return, they provide information to the government, which alarms the ACLU. But there may be more to it than that. One business executive, who showed me his InfraGard card, told me they have permission to “shoot to kill” in the event of martial law.

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Online Journal

As we recover from Super Tuesday, we find Obama with 13 states and Hillary with eight, though hers carry 80 more delegate votes. They seem no longer in a heated debate for right and wrong, but in a cautious waltz, properly distanced not to step on each other’s toes. Perhaps they will dance back in a few months as the Democrat dream-team. After all, we seem to be a nation of American Dreamers, who like things to turn out “nice.” How nice to have a woman and a black man. Ah, but who will be on top?

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American Conservative

A neoconservative clique seeks to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interest.

The War Party may have gotten its war. But it has also gotten something it did not bargain for. Its membership lists and associations have been exposed and its motives challenged. In a rare moment in U.S. journalism, Tim Russert put this question directly to Richard Perle: “Can you assure American viewers ... that we’re in this situation against Saddam Hussein and his removal for American security interests? And what would be the link in terms of Israel?”

=> Read more!

American as well as all western white and blue collar workers will soon realize that they will either have to decrease their wage demands to conform with "global standards" or chose jobs in the service sector. These global standard wages are now being set by worker in India and China, where average hourly wages are about 65 cents and one dollar respectively. The high paying jobs created in Mexico under NAFTA, the whopping $3.50 per hour ones, are moving to China because even this princely wage level is much too generous according to U.S. businessmen.

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Solidarity flourishes the more adverse our external reality gets. Somehow during hardship, as humans we have an innate intuition which draws us closer to each other. Sure, it seems unreal in a time of such consequential conflict in the global society we are constructing, to be talking about fraternal unity.

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“And the governor said, Why, what evil that man (Jesus) has done? But they cried out more vociferously, shouting, let him die, let him die. And when Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was being made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person; see ye to it. Then all the people answered, saying: His blood be on us, and on our children…”Matthew 27 (23-26).

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A young Palestinian girl wounded in an Israeli air strike on Gaza [Gallo/Getty]

Al Jazeera

"Why us? Why are we cold? What is happening?" my children ask all the time.

They are six and two. When they ask for chocolate and I cannot give it to them, they ask why. I explain to them that it is because of the closure, but this does not explain things any further to them, they still ask: "Why? Why us?"

What they least understand is why their lives are being affected by something which they are not responsible for.

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Money Matters / Elaine Supkis

I just saw a picture Bernanke stripped to the waist in the boiler-room shoveling greenbacks into the furnace.

On January 14, 2008 the FDIC web site began posting the rules for reimbursing depositors in the event of a bank failure. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) is required to “determine the total insured amount for each depositor.....as of the day of the failure” and return their money as quickly as possible. The agency is “modernizing its current business processes and procedures for determining deposit insurance coverage in the event of a failure of one of the largest insured depository institutions.

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“You get the government you deserve!” Jay Leno, in reflecting on the lack of political knowledge of the U.S. public.

As the John McCain presidential juggernaut rolls up the victories in GOP primaries across the country, forcing Mitt Romney to quit, a question remains: Who will the Senator from Arizona pick as his running mate in the Vice-President slot? Sen. “Turncoat Joe” Lieberman (IND-CT)? At just about every photo op recently on the campaign trail, Lieberman has been seen standing right next to, or directly behind, Sen. McCain. Which makes me ask: Doesn’t “Turncoat Joe” have a day job? There is little doubt in my mind that Al Gore lost in 2000, mostly because he picked Lieberman as his running mate. He did absolutely nothing for Gore’s candidacy. Labor didn’t want him, nor did the Afro-American community, nor did the progressive elements within the Democratic Party. Gore ignored all of their wishes and charged ahead and “chose” Lieberman as his V.P. Then, he lost the election by--inches. Will McCain make the same mistake in 2008?

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The elephant that has been swept under the carpet to protect the Cheney-Bush regime could not go forever unnoticed by the American people. The unending laundry list of so-called “high crimes and misdemeanors” described in Section 4 of Article II, powers of the President, enumerates such treason that even the Founders and writers of the Constitution, in all likelihood, never had the capacity to either imagine or foresee.

=> Read more!

Illustration: WorldChanging.com

MediaLens

Part 1 of this article can be found HERE

Exchange With The Independent’s Hamish McRae

In Part One of this alert, we noted an observation made by Hamish McRae, economics columnist at the Independent:

“Bankers, like the rest of us, make mistakes, but the scale of the mistakes, particularly in US banks, has been enormous.” (McRae, ‘The markets are bad, but don’t panic just yet’, The Independent, January 23, 2008)

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TomDispatch

[Editor, TomDispatch:] Hardly a week passes in which we don't hear about what the fallout from two disastrous wars is doing to the overextended, overstrained U.S. military, not to speak of the problems the armed forces are facing in retaining and recruiting members.

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Painting: Iraqi artist, Zaid Haidar.

Arab Woman Blues

What is Life ? You breathe in and breathe out...but you have no power over your breath. You breathe while you are unconscious and you breathe while you are asleep, and you breathe in your dreams and your nightmares...but somehow you believe you control your breath and that of others...Breathing is the vital function that indicates you are still alive. That life is still circulating in you...

Torture is about leaving you breathing but with no life circulating. Torture is about exercising the ultimate control, leaving you to hover between life and death. Torture is not only sadistic, it is the ultimate ego trip of someone mistaking himself/herself for God, for “Pneuma”.

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It's been over seven years since the US had real or competent leadership and now a neo-ape man may precipitate our return to the cave! Iran's planned oil bourse threatens not only Bush's simplistic view of the world, it strikes at the the coffers of "big oil". Isolated by mysteriously cut internet cables, Iran --if it is not nuked --will this month begin trading oil in currencies other than the dollar. Bush's cave man response: Nuke Iran! Kill, kill!

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With deepest condolences to the grieving nation

Almost every English daily in Pakistan has carried some coverage of Benazir Bhutto's posthumously published book in the UK. The Daily Times on February 05, 2008, in its editorial, wrote: 'A London newspaper has published excerpts from Ms Benazir Bhutto’s posthumous book “Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West” in which she has revealed that Al Qaeda agents and some people from the Musharraf establishment were involved in the plot to kill her'.

=> Read more!

You get what you pay for? No, these CEOs get what others
have paid for - with blood, sweat, and tears.

A recent report from the Labor Department indicated that U.S. employers cut 17,000 jobs in January of this year. According to the Associated Press, this was "the first such reduction in more than four years."

Many of the job cuts were in manufacturing and "a variety of professional and business services."

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"Senator Obama is not anti-war..."

At what point does an individual stop supporting the lesser of two evils? The question became particularly important this primary race, as one man ascended to political stardom ostensibly breaking free from the evils of mainstream politics and creating a platform based on hope and change. This transcendent figure is presidential hopeful Barack Obama.

Searching for substantive policy, I began to chip away at Obama’s political posturing, and came to a daunting conclusion: there are a multitude of reasons one shouldn’t vote for Barack Obama, especially those within the Arab-American community.

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attack in Dimona

On Monday February 4, 2008, an armed wing of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction carried out a homicide bombing six miles from the only WMD Program in the Middle East.

Reuters reported that a "source said the "Army of Palestine" wing of Fatah's al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades carried out the attack in Dimona along with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

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"his record has been the same as Sen. Clinton. He has voted
to give Bush all the funds he has requested, with no strings
attached and continue the occupation of Iraq."

2008 Campaign shows necessity to build a movement for fundamental change away from militarism

The issue on which Sen. Obama scored the most points in the January 31st debate with Sen. Clinton was the Iraq occupation. While Iraq has been pushed from the front pages, despite continued carnage, it remains a priority for many voters. Iraq persists to be an area of weakness for Clinton in the primary. Indeed, the most recent CNN poll, which has Obama in the lead nationally for the first time, shows Democratic voters trust Clinton more on health care and the economy, but trusted Obama on Iraq. Iraq is the issue propelling Obama ahead of Clinton.

=> Read more!

This article will point out the consequences of a continuation of the U.S.'s mammoth current account deficit. Some believe that stock market and direct capital investments will continue to resolve this problem. These investments, in the long run, make matters worse. They simply represent an asset transfer to compensate for excess consumption. Repatriated profits and dividends will in fact result in a permanent increase in the current account imbalance.

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Photo: First Nations

Znet

May 04, 2002

I keep seeing books, articles and correspondence which refer to a “post-colonial world”. Which world is that? Hand me a telescope. It doesn’t seem to be in this galaxy.

Many of us liken the situation of Palestine to that of Bantustans in apartheid South Africa. Israeli journalist Danny Rubinstein and others have described “autonomy” for Palestinians as being “the autonomy of a POW camp”. Edward Said recently wrote that Israel is engaged in a “current all-out colonial assault on the Palestinian people”.

Absurdly, others still claim that Israel is an “island of democracy” in a dangerous, hostile region.

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Palestine Free Voice

On Tuesday afternoon seven young Palestinian policemen employed in the Gaza-based Executive Forces of the Hamas government,were killed and 14 others were injured, when Israeli terrorists in an helicopter launched several missiles,at the police head quarter in Khan Younis.. Our sources in Gaza City and in Khan Younis, report that the policemen were performing afternoon prayers when the missiles struck the building, seven members of the Executive Police Forces were killed.

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BuzzFlash / Global Research / Uruknet

This individual seeks an executive position. He will be available in January 2009...

This individual seeks an executive position. He will be available in January 2009, and is willing (and hopeful) to relocate.

=> Read more!

Illustration: WorldChanging.com

MediaLens

Watching the corporate media report the ‘financial crisis’ is instructive. From the perspective of power, it is important that a steadying hand is applied to the tiller of news and commentary on the crisis, and the global economy itself.

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"Europe's untouchables have created today's Palestinian untouchables,
especially by a subservient American government and a shackled media."

"International politics are conducted by the media in today's world. Israel must win this war." - Professor Amos Perlmuttler,in "False hopes along fast track to war," Washington Times, May 22, 2001

REF: "The Anger Over an Online Essay",

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The "coincidences":

A series of internet disruptions due to cut telecom cables that has cut Iran off the Internet! Israel is not affected. An Iranian Oil Bourse, where oil, petrochemicals and gas will be traded in various non-dollar currencies, is set to open this month. Israelis have been told to prepare for war, presumably with Iran.

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Jonathan Cook is a British-born independent journalist based (since September 2001) in the predominantly Arab city of Nazareth, Israel and is the "first foreign correspondent (living) in the Israeli Arab city...." He's a former reporter and editor of regional newspapers, a freelance sub-editor with national newspapers, and a staff journalist for the London-based Guardian and Observer newspapers. He's also written for The Times, Le Monde diplomatique, the International Herald Tribune, Al-Ahram Weekly and Aljazeera.net. In February 2004, he founded the Nazareth Press Agency.

=> Read more!

Part One

An Absence of Will

Under constant manipulations, lies and propaganda, a nation of courage has become a nation of cowards. A nation that once questioned its leaders now falls lockstep behind them, blindly following criminality and corruption. A nation that once stood for protests, strikes, marches, sit-ins, challenging the government and seeking accountability now prefers sitting comfortably on couches or chairs, watching the world pass by through television sets or laptops, some becoming arm-chair activists, most simply rotting away their lives, preferring the life of a couch potato, passively ignoring the destruction of rights and freedoms, silently acquiescing to myriad number of crimes against humanity, and obediently shopping, purchasing and consuming according to the dictates of the corporatist world, their new god the Almighty Dollar commanding them to congregate at the Cathedrals of Consumerism, the Malls of Materialism, told to do their job and be good consumers, spending what little they have, even consuming with money that they do not have, and must therefore borrow.

=> Read more!

Jamal Mohammed Bassalla on one of his fishing boats, in Rafah,
in the southern Gaza Strip.

Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR)

"I've been a fisherman for thirty six years, ever since I was fifteen years old. My
original village, Il Jura, was famous for its fishermen. When my father migrated to
Gaza in 1948, he came here by boat."

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“An intelligent Hell would be better than a stupid paradise.” - Victor Hugo

Is there a hell after death? The great Dante, one of Italy’s finest sons, wrote about it in his “Divine Comedy.” In Dante’s fiery inferno, Satan, a fallen Angel, is in charge of dishing out suffering to the damned. In light of the current political situation, I am moved to once again reach for my crystal ball, to revisit hell. Let’s see... In one of the deepest Circles of Hell, I watched President George W. Bush, Jr. and V. P. Dick Cheney floating in “a vile black slush” made from an Exxon oil spill. Satan is particularly proud of this duo for telling the “935” lies that took America into the blood-stained Iraq War. (1) Members of their gang who contributed to that evil campaign of deception join them there. I see among them the convicted perjurer, Irv “Scooter” Libby. Libby (a congenital whiner), wails, over and over again: “Cheney made me do it!”

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"thousands of Pakistanis have fled into Afghanistan"

Just when you thought you had heard it all before, you come across certain events that baffle the mind, bringing such clarity to make you want to crawl back into your hole of ignorance.

Pakistan:

At the same time that United States has revealed that they are about to ramp-up military operations in Pakistan, BBC is reporting that “thousands of Pakistanis have fled into Afghanistan” due to the security situation deteriorating in Pakistan.

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Last week, a secret paramilitary group (formerly?) allied with America was busted in Turkey. Thirteen members of a shadowy right-wing group in Turkey were charged with "forming an armed terrorist group in order to provoke members of the public into armed revolt against the government." http://www.jamestown.org/terrorism/news/article.php?articleid=2373933

=> Read more!

Gus, a civil engineer in Gaza spoke to me in Florida from his cell phone in Gaza by candlelight last Saturday night.

"The Israelis tell the media they are letting electricity in, but it's not true.

=> Read more!

Right up there with the economy as an issue for the election is the the problem of health care for Americans. We know that some forty milliion Americans have no health insurance and those who do are faced with ever-rising deductibles, co-payments, and premium increases. The Presidential candidates all believe they have the answers that the voters will approve but most really are aware that their proposals simply will not work. In the meantime, people are dying from neglect.

=> Read more!

There may have been some secretive, vital, diplomatic or international security reasons, or even possibly some other critical military considerations that shaped their editorial reasoning, but somehow, I doubt that any such considerations came into play regarding The New York Times’ decision to censor and spike the story first broken by the Sunday London Times on May 1, 2005.

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Dear Hillary,

By polling logic, I should be your supporter - Democrat, older woman, white, liberal. I was even in a dorm with you in college. I have pulled for you for years. But something this past summer fundamentally changed my responsibility to my children and grandchildren. In the time I have left in my life to protect them and others, I need to speak out.

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Different countries, different faiths, but the modus operandi of our enemy is the same: they try and encourage old animosities to serve their new desires. In Poland, they revive old anti-Russian feelings to bring Poland into anti-Russian front, in Iraq, they revive old Persian-Arab enmity to isolate Iran. Our view is: Alliance against the Empire; that is why we support independence of Russia and Iran. This mosaic of reports is intellectually challenging but worth it.

=> Read more!

Sabbah

Last week there were strong winds, rain and cold weather all over Israel, and in the Negev. On Wednesday on my way to work I received a call from Sumaya el Atrash, from the village of Saaweh - it is terrible here - come and see if you can help…

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The Palestinian Information Center (PIC)

From Khalid Amayreh in the West Bank

Neturei Karta, an international society representing non-Zionist Orthodox Jews, has blasted recent remarks by Yoni Metzger, Israel’s Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi, in which the rabbi called for the deportation of the people of Gaza to the Egyptian Sinai desert. In a statement circulated to the press earlier this week, Neturei Karta called Metzger’s remarks “vicious and provocative.”

=> Read more!

Illustration: time.com

Valenzuela's Veritas

Manifestations of Intent

Can you smell the smoked fumes of a discombobulated economic engine that has ceased to function, its synergy spitting and sputtering, its many parts thrashed by the claws, and vices, of neoliberal capitalism? Can you feel the dismantling of the economic spark plug, the American consumer, as our livelihoods are sacrificed to the greed, and incompetence, of the establishment and as the value of our lives is further enslaved to the Almighty Dollar and its puppet masters?

=> Read more!

The Israeli embassy in Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, came under attack by anonymous gunmen this week. The attack, in which no people were killed, showed that the Mauritanian people don’t like the presence of Israelis and Zionists on their national soil.

=> Read more!

The FED has been engineering the continuance of a strong dollar and the EU has been forced to follow suit although both countries are facing an ongoing or incipient recession. This article will explain why this policy will fail with the ultimate effect of impoverishing the working classes in both the US and the EU.

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Skeptic Michael Shermer has fallen for the most outlandish conspiracy theory of them all: the official conspiracy theory for which there is not a shred of evidence.

Shermer's recent attempt to "debunk the 911" truth movement is flawed at the outset. His very headline on the Huffington Post is an ad hominem --the 911 movement, he says, are "liars". The bulk of his article is a strawman.

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PACBI.org

Open Letter to the Beatles

Forty-three years ago, the government of Israel banned your performance in the country for fear you would corrupt the minds of Israeli youth. Now, Israel is extending an apology and an invitation to you, hoping you will forget the past and agree to help celebrate its 60th "birthday." The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) urges you to say no to Israel, particularly since the creation of this state 60 years ago dispossessed and uprooted hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes and lands, condemning them to a life of exile and destitution.

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'From An Evil Cradling'

Online Journal

Perhaps a global political apocalypse has already arrived.

Activists and dissidents should understand that evil forces and tyrannical governments have evolved. Just as human knowledge and science expand, so do the strategies and instruments used by rulers, elites and plutocrats. By learning from history and using new technology, they have smarter tools of tyranny. The best ones prevent uprisings, revolutions and political reforms. Rather than violently destroy rebellious movements, they let them survive as marginalized and ineffective efforts that divert and sap the energy of nonconformist and rebellious thinkers. Real revolution remains an energy-draining dream, as evil forces thrive.

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Photo taken from: Voting Expert: Widespread Election Fraud
Again (PrisonPlanet)

Online Journal

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." -- William Casey, former CIA director, at his first staff meeting in 1981.

The great election theft of 2008 began months ago as the "unelectable" candidates were identified, branded, demonized, ridiculed and eventually weeded out one by one. It ended on January 30 when John Edwards, resurgent neo-populist and the last remaining bane of status quo oligarchs, dropped out of the Democratic presidential race.

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If George Washington were alive today, and President of the United States, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg would be tried and hanged for treason. Bloomberg, the financiers' candidate for a Mussolini-style fascist takeover of the United States, through a "Third Way" Presidential candidacy-a plot being implemented even as you read this-openly denounced the American Revolution to the annual conference of the British Tory Party in Blackpool, England on Sept. 30, 2007. After being introduced by fellow British-backed fascist, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who spoke via satellite, Bloomberg declared: "We share a language. Forgive us for mangling it. We share a history. Forgive us for 1776, and we'll forgive you for 1812."

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A third undersea cable has been cut, effectively eliminating the Internet in the Middle East, http://www.spiderednews.com/Internet_I.htm?url=@http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/02/01/africa/ME-GEN-Mideast-Internet-Outages.php But according to CNN that cable outage does not extend to Israel, Lebanon and Iraq. http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/01/31/dubai.outage/index.html

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"Their lives are bigger than any big idea." - "Peace on Earth," U2

My mother passed away on January 12, after a long illness. She was nearly 72 and had been very ill since mid-2005. Intellectually, one might think that perhaps I had time to "come to terms" with a sense of inevitably...yet I remain inconsolable. Despite having almost three years to "prepare" for this reality, her death is teaching me previously unimaginable lessons about grief, sorrow, and loss. My heart is broken, shattered in a million pieces.

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Commentary on U.S. President George W. Bush’s final speech to a disunited Union

Seventeen times in President Bush’s final State of the Union speech he intoned the word "Trust." This word carries with it a depth of human feeling suggesting a bond between self and other, self and self. Trust takes time and attention and develops slowly. Mr. Bush uses the word casually and falsely. From his mouth "trust" rings hollow.

These are my [bracketed] comments on his casual callousness.

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© Ben Heine

Khleej Times

Gaza is on the threshold of becoming the first territory to be intentionally reduced to a state of abject destitution, with the knowledge, acquiescence and - some would say - encouragement of the international community. An international community that professes to uphold the inherent dignity of every human being must not allow this to happen.

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It looks as if the 2008 Presidential campaign may be over at my house. I am considering what other things I can find to do in order to be busy on election day. The choices have been winnowed down until I can find no reason for hope with any of the remaining candidates. I realize that there is much fodder for the talking heads on television as the pseudo rivalry continues but I have now lost interest.

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He is not your stereotypical 911 truther or conspiracy theorist. He doesn’t go around baselessly claiming that the planes that hit the WTC towers were holograms, or saying, “the Jews did it!” His source material is authoritative, well-documented, and much if not most of it comes from mainstream and "official" sources. He is not a partisan hack who parrots hackneyed agit-prop for the sake of Bush-bashing and getting phony “anti-war Democrats” elected. He exposes criminal activity on all points of the political map:

=> Read more!

© Ben Heine

CounterPunch

The breaking of the Gaza-Egypt wall is clearly a good thing, and a rare example of the moral -- and also wise -- use of violence in politics. (For the logic and effects of the Israeli cordon of Gaza see posting of December 7, 2007, "Imposed Hunger in Gaza, The Army in Indonesia. Questions of Logic and Activism").

Most all political violence consists of clear wrongs , like murder or unjustified war, but sometimes, sadly, disgustingly, some violence is justified as a last resort, and sometimes -- as a subcategory of that -- some of that justified violence is also wise, tactically.

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© Carlos Latuff

Amnesty International / Desert Peace

Winograd Commission Report Disregards Israeli War Crimes, Says Amnesty International.

Amnesty International called a report published yesterday by the Winograd Commission on Israel’s conduct in the war with Hizbullah in July-August 2006 “deeply flawed.”

The organization said that the report failed to investigate a crucial aspect of the war — the government policies and military strategies that failed to discriminate between the Lebanese civilian population and Hizbullah combatants and between civilian property and infrastructure and military targets.

=> Read more!

© Carlos Latuff

The Palestinian Information Center (PIC)

Analysis by Khalid Amayreh in occupied E. Jerusalem

Palestinians have welcomed recent statements by top Turkish officials, criticizing the harsh Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip, which has pushed the coastal territory’s 1.5 million inhabitants to the brink of starvation.

Last week, Prime Minister Recep Tayyep Erdogan said the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip were facing a real “humanitarian tragedy.”

=> Read more!

© Ben Heine

The Daily Telegraph

By Barbara Stocking, Director of Oxfam

On the day last week that thousands of Gazans began streaming across the breached border with Egypt, looking for food, medicine and a taste of freedom, one of Oxfam's staff in Gaza told us that his children are now too frightened to sleep anywhere except in their parents' bed. They are six and two, and desperately confused, he said.

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Ismael Haniyeh. Still the Prime Minister of the Palestinian National Authority! "President
Abbas, in league with Israel and the US, declared a "state of emergency" last June and
illegally dismissed Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and his national unity govern-
ment." (~Stephen Lendman) (AP)

Asia Times

To be fair to Hamas, they were never given the opportunity to succeed. They were sentenced to fail from day one, thanks to an international boycott of Palestine, headed by the US, which refused to deal with the democratically elected representatives of the Palestinians. The boycott resorted a proud people to hunger and need. Hamas at the time was dying for the chance to prove itself - to prove that it could deliver. It was willing to walk that extra mile to earn international recognition and lift the boycott imposed on the Palestinians.

=> Read more!

© Ben Heine

The Times

More floods, heat waves, insect-borne disease... Doctors are worried about how global warming will affect our health.

You might think that a little climate change would not go amiss in the British Isles. We’d have more warm summers and fewer freezing winters. What’s wrong with that?

Ask the people of Yorkshire. As a result of global warming, many homeowners this week are up to their waists inmuddy water. And flooding could be just the beginning of our worries.

=> Read more!

Tens of millions are just a lost job away from homelessness. Mission accomplished for The Money Party. (Nathan Rein CC)

"The FBI is investigating every level of the conspiracy that it believes perpetuated the housing boom..." TimesOnline Jan. 31, 2007

=> Read more!

According to the Russian Communist theorist
Georgy Plekhanov, “the belief in art for
art’s sake arises when artists and people
keenly interested in art are hopelessly out
of harmony with their social environment.”

From Tom Paine's Corner

A beginner journalist in Rome asked my advice about an upcoming interview with a well-known media exponent and famous opportunist of Italy’s extreme right-wing —the young lady had qualms because, as she said, she understood nothing of politics. Well, since ignorance of politics didn’t seem like an auspicious start, I outlined my views on the reality of current Italian and European politics.

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