August 2011

Obama calls on Syria’s Assad to step down

by News Sources 08.18.2011

Al Jazeera reports: International pressure is mounting on Bashar al-Assad, president of Syria, with the United States calling for his resignation and the United Nations claiming Syria’s use of force against anti-government protests may constitute crimes against humanity. In a written statement on Thursday, President Barack Obama said: “The future of Syria must be determined [...]

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Phone hacking: News of the World Hollywood reporter is arrested

by News Sources 08.18.2011

The Guardian reports: James Desborough, an award-winning reporter at the former News of the World newspaper, has been arrested by officers investigating the phone-hacking scandal. Desborough was arrested on suspicion of conspiring to intercept communications, contrary to section 1 (1) of the Criminal Law Act 1977 after arriving at a south London police station on [...]

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How Rupert Murdoch tries to destroy the lives of his enemies

by News Sources 08.18.2011

The Guardian reports: Five years ago Robert Emmel was enjoying the American dream. He lived in a detached house in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, drove a BMW, and earned $140,000 a year as an accounts director in a highly successful advertising company called News America Marketing. Today, Emmel is described by his lawyers as [...]

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David Bromwich: George W. Obama?

by TomDispatch 08.18.2011

Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com Those first acts of that first shining full day in the Oval Office are now so forgotten, but on January 21, 2009, among other things, Barack Obama promised to return America to “the high moral ground,” and then signed a straightforward executive order “requiring that the Guantanamo Bay detention facility [...]

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Rebels gain near Tripoli, as refugees pour out

by News Sources 08.17.2011

Charles Levinson reports from Zawiya: Fighting raged for a fourth straight day in this strategic coastal city 30 miles west of Tripoli on Wednesday, as rebel fighters battled to mop up pockets of loyalist soldiers and laid siege to the regime’s last working oil refinery. The roads leading to Zawiya were clogged with rebel fighters [...]

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Thousands of Palestinian refugees in Syria flee during military assault

by News Sources 08.17.2011

The New York Times reports: United Nations officials said Tuesday that as many as 10,000 residents of a Palestinian refugee neighborhood in the Syrian port city of Latakia had fled during a four-day assault, as security forces carried out more arrests and intimidation in what residents said was a government attempt to rebuild a wall [...]

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Looting with the lights on

by News Sources 08.17.2011

Naomi Klein writes: I keep hearing comparisons between the London riots and riots in other European cities – window-smashing in Athens or car bonfires in Paris. And there are parallels, to be sure: a spark set by police violence, a generation that feels forgotten. But those events were marked by mass destruction; the looting was [...]

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The empire at dusk

by News Sources 08.17.2011

In State vs. Defense: The Battle to Define America’s Empire, Stephen Glain writes: In its scramble to avoid another legislative gang war over the nation’s debt ceiling, Washington is preparing to shake down the Defense Department in the name of deficit reduction. While budget cutters preoccupy themselves with line-item expenditures, they overlook the Pentagon’s biggest [...]

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Shaping a new world order

by News Sources 08.17.2011

Andrew Bacevich writes: Chief among the problems facing the United States today is this: too many obligations piled high without the wherewithal to meet them. Among those obligations are the varied and sundry commitments implied by the phrase “American global leadership.” If ever there were an opportune moment for reassessing the assumptions embedded in that [...]

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Is capitalism doomed?

by News Sources 08.17.2011

Nouriel Roubini writes: The massive volatility and sharp equity-price correction now hitting global financial markets signal that most advanced economies are on the brink of a double-dip recession. A financial and economic crisis caused by too much private-sector debt and leverage led to a massive re-leveraging of the public sector in order to prevent Great [...]

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U.S. impotent in face of Middle East events

by News Sources 08.17.2011

Zvi Bar’el writes: How long will the Syrian protesters wait until the United States and its allies deign to intervene in their slow massacre? What is the critical mass of people who must be killed for the “international community” to act? When there’s an earthquake, countries jostle each other to be visibly first in line [...]

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Libya shows signs of slipping from Muammar Gaddafi’s grasp

by News Sources 08.16.2011

The Guardian reports: Muammar Gaddafi’s regime has shown fresh signs of buckling as rebels have come close to cutting off supply routes and the Libyan interior minister arrived in Egypt in what appeared to be the highest-ranking defection for many months. The Libyan leader broadcast a defiant appeal to his supporters to rid the country [...]

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England riots: pair jailed for four years for using Facebook to incite disorder

by News Sources 08.16.2011

The Guardian reports: Two men have been jailed for four years for using Facebook to incite disorder. Jordan Blackshaw, 20, from Marston near Northwich, and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, 22, from Warrington, appeared at Chester crown court on Tuesday. They were arrested last week following incidents of violent disorder in London and other cities across the UK. [...]

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Donors help keep Palestinians in cages

by News Sources 08.16.2011

Charlotte Silver writes: “Israel besieges us, puts us in cantons — in cages — and the international community is feeding us in these cages. It’s anything but developmental and it’s helping Israel’s colonization, ethnic cleansing and dispossession,” Dr. Samia Botmeh said, as she sat in her office in the Center for Development Studies (CDS) at [...]

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Al Jazeera journalist held in Israeli prison

by News Sources 08.16.2011

Al Jazeera reports: Samer Allawi, Al Jazeera Arabic’s Kabul bureau chief, has been brought before an Israeli military court, almost a week after he was arrested by Israeli officials when he tried to cross the border between Jordan and the occupied West Bank. Israeli authorities extended his detention by seven days and charged him with [...]

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Is the Islamic terrorism threat overblown?

by News Sources 08.16.2011

Religion News Service reports: After a car bomb detonated on Wall Street one minute past the noon lunch hour killing 38 people, federal investigators came up with a possible link to an overseas group. Islamic terrorists? Al-Qaida? No, Italian anarchists. The year was 1920, and in those days anarchists were the equivalent of today’s terrorists, [...]

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Mounting evidence of a News Corp cover-up

by News Sources 08.16.2011

The Guardian reports: Rupert Murdoch, James Murdoch and their former editor Andy Coulson all face embarrassing new allegations of dishonesty and cover-up after the publication of an explosive letter written by the News of the World’s disgraced royal correspondent, Clive Goodman. In the letter, which was written four years ago but published only on Tuesday, [...]

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Syria orders thousands into stadium in Latakia crackdown

by News Sources 08.16.2011

The Los Angeles Times reports: Syrian security forces cracking down on opposition strongholds in Latakia herded thousands of people into a stadium and took away their identification cards and cellphones, activists said Monday. Forces loyal to the regime of President Bashar Assad continued hammering opposition strongholds in the country’s main port city, especially in the [...]

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Rick Perry, friend of Israel, on a mission from God, calls for Ben Bernanke to be lynched

by News Sources 08.16.2011

Think Progress: Texas Governor Rick Perry, who entered the presidential campaign on Saturday, appeared to suggest a violent response would be warranted should Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke “print more money” between now and the election. Speaking just now in Iowa, Perry said, “If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I [...]

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Britain follows Iran’s lead — clamps down on water fights

by News Sources 08.16.2011

Robert Mackey reports: In a demonstration of the kind of zero-tolerance policing of modern criminality that will no doubt impress Iran’s morals police as much as Egypt’s military rulers, officers outside London announced on Monday that they had arrested a man for sending text messages encouraging people to take part in a mass water fight. [...]

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Chris Hellman: The Pentagon’s spending spree

by TomDispatch 08.16.2011

Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com China just launched a refitted Ukrainian aircraft carrier from the 1990s on its first test run — and that’s what the only projected “great power” enemy of the U.S. has to offer for the foreseeable future.  In the meantime, the U.S. Navy has 11 aircraft carrier task forces to cruise [...]

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Glenn Beck calls Israel social protesters ‘communists’

by News Sources 08.16.2011

Haaretz reports: Beck is currently in Israel for a mass rally to “Restore Courage” in Jerusalem. The conservative pundit, who left Fox News in June of this year, scoffed at the protesters’ list of demands, comparing many of their calls for increased social benefits to those of the former Soviet Union. When he heard that [...]

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Report reveals harsh condition in Israeli jails

by News Sources 08.16.2011

Haaretz reports: Inmates were cuffed hand and foot as a punishment, sometimes for months on end, while prisoners considered suicidal remained in restraints for long periods without access to proper medical care, according to a recent report on conditions in Israeli prisons in 2009 and 2010. The report, issued by the Justice Ministry’s Public Defender’s [...]

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U.S. senator seeks to cut aid to Israeli special forces operating in West Bank and Gaza

by News Sources 08.15.2011

Haaretz reports: U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy is promoting a bill to suspend U.S. assistance to three elite Israel Defense Forces units, alleging they are involved in human rights violations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Leahy, a Democrat and senior member of the U.S. Senate, wants assistance withheld from the Israel Navy’s Shayetet 13 [...]

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