Category: News

BRUSSELS (IPS) – Ninety-eight percent of registered victims of cluster bombs are civilians, Handicap International, a UK-based NGO said in a report published Thursday.

The report Fatal Footprint was launched in several countries ahead of an international conference on conventional weapons starting in Geneva November 7.

Among others the report cites the case of Adnan’s family. He was not quite seven years old when it happened. On August 11, 1999, shortly after some of the worst of the fighting in Kosovo in the Balkans, he went swimming with his family in a lake a few kilometres from their village.
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An American general in Baghdad called Iraq a “work of art” in progress yesterday in one of the most extraordinary attempts by the US military leadership to put a positive spin on the worsening violence.

“Every great work of art goes through messy phases while it is in transition. A lump of clay can become a sculpture. Blobs of paint become paintings which inspire,” Maj Gen Caldwell told journalists in Baghdad’s fortified green zone.
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What bizarre science-fiction horrors have to occur before the American media wakes up to the strange war that Israel is prosecuting against Palestinian and Lebanese civilians? People are still being maimed or killed every day in Lebanon thanks to unexploded cluster ordinance dropped massively by Israel in the 48 hours after a cease-fire had been negotiated but before it went into effect. Over 30 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed in October alone. As usual, however, Lebanon and Palestine have vanished from the newscycle (where Israel is currently represented by a president who refuses to step down despite an all-but-indictment for multiple rape charges and an openly fascist party joining the government ). But there has been a steady drumbeat of revelations, largely in the Israeli and British media, ignored entirely by the American media, about Israel’s use of horrifying new weapons on civilian populations.
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A functioning democracy requires open debate and accurate information. As the recent studies by Americans United for Palestinian Human Rights demonstrate, the Oregonian's news coverage is seriously biased when it covers the Palestine / Israel conflict and the Oregonian's editorial coverage silences voices that need to be heard. Scary, isn't it?

See our flyer at:
http://www.auphr.org/flyers/Oregonian-BOO!.pdf
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The soldiers came and beat us two more times. The last time was really brutal. Three soldiers, one of them the tall one, beat us hard and quick. They kicked us, hit us with their rifle butts, and punched us all over our bodies. Nidal and I stayed next to each other out of fear and pain. This went on for about fifteen minutes. We screamed and asked for help, thinking somebody outside might come and rescue us from the horrible nightmare. The pain was intolerable. I felt as if I were about to die. One of them hit me in the midsection with his rifle and I fell to the floor. He hit me on my right hand and I felt like it was broken. I lost consciousness.
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Six Palestinians and one Israeli soldier have been killed in heavy clashes in the northern Gaza Strip.

In one of Israel’s biggest raids into Gaza in recent months, troops carried out three air strikes and moved to encircle the town of Beit Hanoun.

More than 35 people were wounded as troops, backed by tanks and helicopter gunships, carried out the raid.

An Israeli military spokesman said the operation was aimed at stopping rocket fire into Israel.

Palestinian leaders have strongly condemned it.

Both the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and the Prime Minister, Ismail Haniya, have described the Israeli military action as a massacre.
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HERE in Gaza, few dream of peace. For now, most dare only to dream of a lack of war. It is for this reason that Hamas proposes a long-term truce during which the Israeli and Palestinian peoples can try to negotiate a lasting peace.

A truce is referred to in Arabic as a “hudna.” Typically covering 10 years, a hudna is recognized in Islamic jurisprudence as a legitimate and binding contract. A hudna extends beyond the Western concept of a cease-fire and obliges the parties to use the period to seek a permanent, nonviolent resolution to their differences.
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Omri Evron, a 19-year-old from Tel-Aviv, is weeks away from earning his B.A. in ethical philosophy from the Tel-Aviv University (TAU). He started studying for this degree when he was still a high-school student.

Omri is known around the campus of TAU as a leading social activist. Last month, for example, he started a petition of university and high-school students from around the country, protesting the exploitation of maintenance and cleaning workers in educational institutions.

At least once a week, Omri visits the Palestinian village of Bili'in, showing his support for the local Palestinian farmers who are campaigning against the Israeli separation wall that separates them from about 50 percent of their lands. In Bili'in, just like in Tel-Aviv, Omri has earned the reputation of a respected human rights activist.
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The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Geoff Simons. London: The Palestinian Return Center. 2006.

Reading about the ethnic cleansing of Palestine from this work is intense and relentless. Geoff Simons’ look at the problem in Palestine of the Israeli onslaught against the indigenous population keeps coming at the reader, insistently, imperatively, and almost overwhelming to the point of exhaustion. Story after story, anecdote after anecdote, irrefutable evidence ongoing with excellent source information from personal diaries of those involved on both sides, government records, and NGO records all contribute to this seemingly never-ending compendium of information. As a reader I ran through a full range of emotions: anger, frustration, hopelessness, rage, sadness, and the unsettling sense in both mind and heart that the cause of these feelings is the brutality and savageness of a society that is – that has – descended into a state of blind immorality.
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[Something completely different . . . however, events like climate change not only threaten our lives, but threaten all efforts to build a better and more stable world through peace and justice]

Climate change could devastate the global economy on a scale of the two world wars and the depression of the 1930s if left unchecked, a top economist has warned.

Introducing the report by Nicholas Stern, the British government also said Monday that former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, who is now a vocal environmental advocate, is to serve as one of its advisers on the issue.

The report’s main argument is that the benefits of coordinated action around the world to tackle global warming will greatly outweigh any financial costs.
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