The Israeli foreign minister says he will block any attempt by the coalition government to extend the partial freeze on settlements in the West Bank. In an interview with Israeli Army Radio, Mr Lieberman - who lives in a settlement himself - said there was "no need to extend the freeze".

I do not believe that a comprehensive agreement with the Palestinians is possible within a year, nor even during the next generation” "Yisrael Beitenu has enough power in the government and in parliament to ensure that no such proposal succeeds," he said on Sunday.

His nationalist party is the second largest faction in the governing coalition after Mr Netanyahu's right-wing Likud party, which also opposes any extension. On Sunday, Mr Lieberman reportedly brushed off the latest round of talks, from which he has been largely sidelined.

"I do not believe that a comprehensive agreement with the Palestinians is possible within a year, nor even during the next generation," he said, according to army radio.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has said the settlement issue should be discussed alongside other core disputes, including the final status of Jerusalem and the fate of Palestinian refugees. Some 300,000 Israelis live in West Bank settlements, among the territory's 2.5 million Palestinians. They are considered illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.

Over 15,000 domestic workers leave their families to come to Britain every year. Charities claim that many are not only badly treated but that they are living as slaves. This report investigates the plight of overseas domestic workers brought to the UK, and enslaved behind closed doors by rich and powerful employers in the upper levels of British society. Dispatches goes undercover as some of the employers accused of modern-day slavery are confronted on camera about how they have treated their workers. Many workers make the sacrifice to leave their country for the UK in order to better provide for their families back home. But lobby groups and charities communicate that a worrying proportion of domestic workers have their passports taken away from them, are kept locked up and subjected to sexual, physical and psychological abuse. Many are paid less than £50 a week for 20 hour days and some wages are withheld completely. Even children face similar horrendous conditions; the filmmakers meet young people who were trafficked over to the UK as children and endured years of violence and forced labour.

[Photo: Ritual: Hundreds of thousands of Muslims move around the Kaaba, the black cube at the centre of Saudi Arabia's Grand Mosque, during Ramadan on Sunday]

They have come in their hundreds of thousands, all devout, converging on one of the world's holiest places.

This was the scene at the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the birthplace of Islam, yesterday as Muslims around the world celebrated Ramadan.

The Grand Mosque houses the Kaaba, the most holy place in Islam, a square-shaped building that predates the religion itself. It is the Kaaba that Muslims around the world are facing when they pray towards Mecca. A duty for every able-bodied Muslim at least once in his or her lifetime, the gruelling five-day haj ritual is one of the world's biggest displays of mass religious devotion.

Pilgrims converge on the Grand Mosque and follow a route around the rocky mountains of the ancient city in line with a tradition established by the Prophet Mohammed. The festival, which begins after the sighting of a new crescent moon, marks the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. During Ramadan, devout Muslims abstain from food, drink, smoking and sex from sunrise to sunset.

Whale meat is on the menu at about a sixth of Japan's state-run primary and junior high schools, a survey released today showed. Of 29,600 public primary and junior high schools nationwide providing lunches for students, 5355 schools served whale meat at least once during the fiscal year to March 2010, the survey by Kyodo news revealed. In Japan, cooked whale meat was a regular item on school lunch menus in the 1960s and 1970s as the annual supply of the meat reached a peak of 220,000 tonnes. It subsequently fell out of favour, with the supply dwindling to around 1000 tonnes in the 1990s as an international ban on commercial whaling was introduced. But whale meat has recently made a reappearance on the school lunch table as the country gradually increased its catch of the ocean giants, Kyodo said. The Institute of Cetacean Research, which carries out whaling in the name of research, sells whale meat to local municipalities for school lunch use at one-third of the market price, it said. Japan hunts whales under a loophole to an international moratorium that allows the killing of the sea mammals for scientific research but it does not hide the fact that the meat is later sold in shops and restaurants.

AWIP: Report: Japan bribed countries ‘with cash, prostitutes’ to keep whaling.

The pre-planned removal of the debris from the WTC demolitions to the Fresh Kills landfill served the cover up with destruction of evidence in a crime scene.

Officials' handling of the evidence of the September 11th attack has followed a clear pattern. The physical evidence most important to forensic analysis of the crime was destroyed or removed from the crime scene never to be seen again. Types of evidence not under the direct control of those officials were suppressed through a variety of means. These include photographs, video footage, and various once-public documents.{more}

The Destruction of Evidence from Ground Zero at the World Trade Center following the events of September 11, 2001, occurred, even though the criminal code requires that crime scene evidence be kept for forensic analysis. FEMA had steel recovered from the building rubble destroyed or shipped overseas before a serious investigation could take place. {more]

Ground Zero was the site of one of the largest evidence destruction operations in history. It was the scene of the mass murder of nearly 3000 people. Believing the official myth that Osama bin Laden's cells of hijackersTwin Towers does little to diminish the importance of the remains of the towers and Building 7 as evidence, since the collapse of these three skyscrapers contradicts the entire history of engineered steel structures. Yet the remains of these buildings were systematically removed and destroyed, and their examination was rendered impossible.

A top Belgian politician warned the country's citizens on Sunday to "get ready for the break-up of Belgium," as King Albert II seeks to relaunch knife-edge coalition talks. Leading francophone Socialist Laurette Onkelinx, considered a potential successor to party chief Elio Di Rupo, who gave up on negotiations with separatist Flemish leaders on Friday, gave her prognosis in a newspaper interview.

"Let's hope it doesn't come to that because if we split, it will be the weakest who will pay the heaviest price," she told La Derniere Heure. "On the other hand, we can no longer ignore that among a large part of the Flemish population, it's their wish. "So yes, we have to get ready for the break-up of Belgium. Otherwise we're cooked.

US authorities have begun to consider approval for the first time the sale of genetically engineered salmon, a move that some say could open the door to more transgenic animals on American dinner tables. A US Food and Drug Administration panel has set a hearing for September 19-20 to consider a proposal by Massachusetts-based AquaBounty Technologies for production and sale of a new Atlantic salmon with a growth hormone gene from the Chinook salmon that allows it to grow faster. The company said the genetic change allows the fish to grow to market size in half the time of conventional salmon but that in all other respects, its AquAdvantage salmon "are identical to other Atlantic salmon." The new strain of salmon can help meet rising demand for fish and reduce pressure on wild fish stocks, the firm contends. It says it can avoid the pollution, disease and other problems associated with saltwater fish farms by raising the salmon at inland facilities.

Israeli Soldiers Looking for Children to Arrest in Nabi Salih.

The massive separation wall on the south side of the town reinforces the feeling of existing in a pocket. With discussion of direct talks, peace and final borders in the news, it is easy to make the connection between rhetoric and reality on the ground. There are no borders between the West Bank and Israel. Only 650 checkpoints which move like waves in the sea at the whim of every military commander. Depsite the lack of borders, the difference between the settler towns and those of the natives, to borrow Fanon’s language, is stark and paralyzing.

The final Friday of Ramadan saw a round of demonstrations against the occupation and the Separation wall throughout the West Bank. I traveled to Ni’ilin as well as Nabi Salih, to document and support friends at the sites of struggle. The end of summer is a strange time for the popular struggle. Many international supporters who travel to Israel/Palestine for a summer of occupation tourism return to their home countries while a new wave of supporters replaces them. It is a time of transition and anticipation for the fall. As we traveled from Tel Aviv to Ni’ilin, the invisiblity of borders between Israel and the West Bank struck me. We drove up route 443 and turned left towards Modayin Elite. Even though the roads are in the West Bank it feels as though we are in the middle of the Tel Aviv suburbs. There is no sign marking the green line. There is nothing, just one whitewashed Israeli town after another. After we pass Modayin Elite, we arrive at a checkpoint. This feels kind of like a border but it is temporary and shifting. Just after the checkpoint, we take a sharp left and are in the middle of the city of Ni’ilin. It feels like a pocket. A pocket of natives in a sea of settlers. I can’t help but think of the beginning of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, “the zone where the natives live is not complementary to the zone inhabited by the settler. The two zones are opposed, but not in the service of a higher unity.”

Some 100,000 people joined demonstrations Saturday in 140 French towns to protest against President Nicolas Sarkozy’s anti-immigrant and repressive policies and his crackdown on Roma communities. Minister of the Interior Brice Hortefeux issued a statement in response, declaring, “I will press on with my determined action to drive back all forms of delinquency and defend victims’ rights, and I will do this without stigmatising any community whatsoever.”

Sarkozy’s conservative Gaullist government is in profound crisis. The president’s approval rating is hovering around 30 percent and some 70 percent of the population has expressed support for the day of action to be held September 7 in opposition to the government’s austerity policies. Sporadic strikes and workplace occupations have taken place throughout the year in opposition to sackings, closures and wage cuts, while corruption scandals have mushroomed involving former Gaullist President Jacques Chirac, Sarkozy and Sarkozy’s labour minister, Eric Woerth.

smh.com.au: French officials unfazed as thousands rally for Roma
AWIP: Stop this state persecution of Roma.
AWIP: Back to Vichy
Saman: The Plight of the Romani People
AWIP: First they came for the Muslims; then they came for the Roma...(VIDEO)
Michaela Stanková: A wall to keep out Roma and The cost of excluding the Roma minority
Pete Brook: The Roma People: Matt Lutton building upon a legacy of wandering photographers

The US Justice Department filed criminal charges against Hakimullah Mehsud last Wednesday for allegedly organising the suicide attack in December on Forward Operating Base Chapman in Afghanistan near the border with Pakistan that killed seven CIA agents and wounded six more. The State Department also confirmed that it had added Mehsud’s Tehrik-e-Taliban to its list of “foreign terrorist organisations”, and is offering rewards of up to $5 million for information about the location of Mehsud and his second-in-command, Wali Ur-Rehman. Two counts filed in a District Court in Washington charge Mehsud with conspiracy to murder US citizens abroad and conspiracy to use a “weapon of mass destruction”—the home-made suicide bomb used by the CIA contact who carried out the attack. The charges carry a sentence of life in prison, but a US official told Reuters that they “are meant to deal with Hakimullah if he’s captured. … He can face justice in other ways too. That hasn’t changed.” In other words, the CIA and US military are still seeking to murder Mehsud using missiles launched from remote-controlled Predator drones.

Serendipity: The CIA as a Terrorist Organization

A Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) memo released by WikiLeaks last month has revealed Washington's long tradition of exporting terrorism abroad, supported by radical American Jews. The memo, penned by a CIA group known as the "Red Cell" on February 5, warns that the US has long ignored "homegrown terrorism" exported overseas by Jewish extremist groups, a report published by alertnet.org said. Unlike what the US media draw out, the "American export of terrorism or terrorists" is not associated with "Islamic radicals or people of Middle Eastern, African or South Asian ethnic origin," the memo said. This deep-rooted phenomenon has long been backed and even carried out by Jewish extremists in the United States against the so-called 'enemies of Israel,' the report added.

Larry Chin: WikiLeaks’ CIA Red Cell memo: Orwellian mindset exposed

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ruled out an attack on the Islamic republic over its nuclear programme, during a visit to Qatar on Sunday, because any such action would result in Israel's destruction. Israel, the region's sole if undeclared nuclear power, has not ruled out a military strike to prevent Iran acquiring an atomic weapons capability, an ambition its arch-foe Tehran strongly denies.

"Any act against Iran will lead to the eradication of the Zionist entity," he told a joint news conference in Doha with Qatar's emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, after their talks. "The Zionist entity and the US government would hit any country in the region whenever they are able to do so, and they will not wait to get permission. But (at the moment) they cannot," he said. "Iran has the ability to retaliate, strong and hard," warned Ahmadinejad, whose comments in Farsi were translated into Arabic.

If these Bushies want to come on the air to attempt some turd polishing about why the Bush administration chose to invade Iraq, a country that was not a threat to us, then they should be treated the way Paul Begala treated lying propagandist Ari Fleischer on Anderson Cooper's AC360.

WaPo: The true cost of the Iraq war: $3 trillion and beyond
The National: They caused the Iraq War and remain without shame.

Antiwar: Joe Biden and the False Iraq War Narrative In an interview on the PBS NewsHour last Wednesday, Joe Biden was unwilling to contradict the official narrative of the Iraq War that Gen. David Petraeus and the Bush surge had turned Iraq into a good war after all. That interview serves as a reminder of just how completely the Democratic Party foreign policy elite has adopted that narrative.

The CIA took an internal poll not long ago about friendly foreign intelligence agencies. The question, mostly directed to employees of the clandestine service branch, was: Which are the best allies among friendly spy services, in terms of liaison with the CIA, and which are the worst? In other words, who acts like, well, friends?

“Israel came in dead last,” a recently retired CIA official told me the other day. Not only that, he added, throwing up his hands and rising from his chair, “the Israelis are number three, with China number one and Russia number two,” in terms of how aggressive they are in their operations on U.S. soil.

Israel’s undercover operations here, including missions to steal U.S. secrets, are hardly a secret at the FBI, CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies. From time to time, in fact, the FBI has called Israeli officials on the carpet to complain about a particularly brazen effort to collect classified or other sensitive information, in particular U.S. technical and industrial secrets.

The base, near Kibbutz Urim, is central to the activities of the main Israel Defense Forces signals intelligence unit, 8200, according to report in Le Monde Diplomatique. Israel has one of the largest signals intelligence (SIGINT) bases in the world in the western Negev, Le Monde Diplomatique reported. The base, near Kibbutz Urim, is central to the activities of the main Israel Defense Forces signals intelligence unit, 8200, the report says. According to the report, the base has 30 antennas and satellite dishes of different sizes and types, capable of eavesdropping on telephone calls and accessing the e-mail of "governments, international organizations, foreign companies, political groups and individuals." One of the base's main purposes is to listen to transmissions from ships passing in the Mediterranean, the report says. The base is also the center of intelligence activity that "taps underwater communication cables, mostly in the Mediterranean, connecting Israel with Europe."

Philip Giraldi: Mossad in America

Dr. Alan Sabrosky, former Director of Studies at the U.S. Army War College, on audio. The video details evidence on why it is 100% certain that Israel did 9/11 and the official story is a pack of lies. To learn more about the conspiracy facts of 9/11, see:

http://www.takeourworldback.com/itwas...
http://www.takeourworldback.com/911re...
http://www.archive.org/details/TheLib...
http://sabbah.biz/mt/archives/2009/09...

His article of March 2010 entitled Zionism Unmasked: The Dark Face of Jewish Nationalism, discussed in the audio with Mark Glenn and Phil Tourney, is at:

http://gerontios48.wordpress.com/2010...