In August, I witnessed the third demolition of the unrecognized Bedouin village of Al-Arakib in Israel’s Negev desert. It was a harrowing scene that I will never forget. And it has been repeated five times since then, forcing the residents to sleep in the open air while rebuilding their homes over and over. I knew at the time that the Jewish National Fund, a quasi-governmental organization that plants trees all around Israel, especially over destroyed Palestinian villages, planned to establish a forest on the land that Al-Arakib stood. But I didn’t know at the time that the financing for the forest came from an extreme dominionist evangelical broadcasting network called GOD TV, or that the forest, which already represented an insane plan since it was going to fill an arid desert with non-native trees, would be called “GOD TV Forest.”

Since then, GOD TV’s real motives have come to light. Since then, GOD TV’s real motives have come to light. And (surprise, surprise!), GOD TV personality and complete huckster Rory Alec makes no secret of his desire “to plant a million trees to prepare the land for the return of [God's] son.” Once again, the Jewish — I repeat, Jewish! — state of Israel has partnered with open anti-Semites to dispossess the Palestinian un-people.

PORT-AU-PRINCE (World News) — The number of deaths from cholera in Haiti rose to 2.901 victims with official estimates on Thursday showed the highest daily death toll since the outbreak occurred in mid-October. The number of cholera deaths were confirmed on December 19, record the second largest number of victims in a day, accounting for less than 100 people, according to data presented by the Ministry of Health of Haiti, much higher than other peaks which counted 80 people in mid-November.

The total number of infected surged close to 150,000 in Haiti and the Dominican Republic authorities, neighboring countries to the west of Haiti, on Thursday reported 120 cases occurred, but no fatalities. Haiti’s first outbreak of cholera occurred more than a century ago that the dysfunction torture poor countries and politically, is now trying to rise from the massive earthquake in January that killed 250,000 people.

Julian Assange has set the ultimate dead man's switch: Arrest or kill him and thousands of files will be automatically released, including documents that out CIA-backed Arabs. The Wikileaks leader had previously claimed to have files on auto-release. That he had info on CIA ties was first-mentioned in an interview yesterday with Al-Jazeera. This is exactly the type of information that lead people to condemn Wikileaks as dangerous. If released it would certainly endanger many American operatives and cause a massive political disruption. [WikiLeaks is dangerous to the bad guys ("American operatives" and their Middle East stooges). Massive political disruption is positive and very necessary.]

The Peninsula: Many Arab officials have close CIA links: Assange

Residents hit by dramatic floods in Queensland will be eligible for disaster relief money, Australia's prime minister has said as she visited the affected area. Heavy rains battered the state for several days and river levels have continued to rise, leading to water covering an area larger than France and Germany combined. Some of the 200,000 people who live in the region have been forced to leave their homes and the military has sent planes to fly drop supplies into towns.

MB.com.ph: 200,000 affected by Aussie flood
Crikey: Bureau of Meteorology shows the real flood picture

Nearly 1,100 Palestinian children have been arrested by Israeli troops in 2010, a new report by the Palestinian Authority (PA) Ministry of Detainees' Affairs shows. The ministry said on Wednesday that about 500 of the above-mentioned figure were detained in the city of al-Khalil (Hebron) in the occupied West Bank, Maan news agency reported.

PA Detainees' Affairs Minister Issa Qaraqe said the high number reflected the Israeli policy to systematically pursue children, particularly in the occupied East al-Quds (Jerusalem), where children were often put under house arrest. According to the report, prisoners were routinely kept in solitary confinement in cells, which resembled graves. Some prisoners, including Hassan Salameh and Ahmad al-Mughrabi, have been spending more than eight years in such inhumane conditions. The Israeli intelligence service Shin Bet ordered 12 Palestinian prisoners to serve long sentences in solitary confinement, the report said.

The US military is investigating the leadership of an army brigade whose soldiers are accused of running a "kill team" that murdered Afghan civilians, as further evidence emerges of widespread complicity in the deaths. A brigadier general is conducting a "top to bottom" review of the 5th Stryker brigade after five of its soldiers were committed for trial early next year charged with involvement in the murders of three Afghans and other alleged crimes including mutilating their bodies, and collecting fingers and skulls from corpses as trophies. Among the issues under investigation is the failure of commanders to intervene when the alleged crimes were apparently widely spoken about among soldiers.

The Guardian: US soldiers 'killed Afghan civilians for sport and collected fingers as trophies'

President Obama’s claims of progress in the Afghan War don’t seem to be cutting into the realities of record death tolls and official predictions of more record death tolls to come, as a new CNN/Opinion Research poll (PDF) shows support for the conflict continuing to wane.

The poll now shows 63 percent of the American public opposed to the war, the largest opposition yet from the regular poll. The breakdown showed strong opposition across race, gender, regional and age lines. A secondary question asked the public how “things are going” in Afghanistan and showed 56 percent of Americans believe the war is going either “moderately badly” or “very badly.”

Kavkaz Center: Robert Gates: 'We're not ever leaving' Afghanistan

A study examining the causes of a dramatic spike in birth defects in the Iraqi city of Falluja has for the first time concluded that genetic damage could have been caused by weaponry used in US assaults that took place six years ago. The research, which will be published next week, confirms earlier estimates revealed by the Guardian of a major, unexplained rise in cancers and chronic neural-tube, cardiac and skeletal defects in newborns. The authors found that malformations are close to 11 times higher than normal rates, and rose to unprecedented levels in the first half of this year – a period that had not been surveyed in earlier reports. The findings, which will be published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, come prior to a much-anticipated World Health Organisation study of Falluja's genetic health. They follow two alarming earlier studies, one of which found a distortion in the sex ratio of newborns since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 – a 15% drop in births of boys.

It is these very images Raed Abu al-Hummus remembers of spending more than six years in an Israeli prison. Raed is one of many Palestinians who have experienced excessive torture in Israeli prisons. Now, a new report reveals 90% of these prisoners being physically and mentally tortured by the Israeli security service are deprived from consulting with an attorney or their family before confessions are made.

The study, produced by the Israeli human rights organization, Public Committee Against Torture and Palestinian Prisoners' Society, has found that during some periods when prisoners are kept from meeting with their lawyers, Shin Bet, begins its interrogation. The report cites these cases as a an act of "systematic violence" and torture. Many Palestinian prisoners who have testified have claimed that the excessive torture and the psychological abuse were merely some tools to get the prisoners to confess to crimes they were accused of. Ironically enough, the prisoners were granted a visit to a lawyer, but only after they have agreed to confess to the crimes.

Democracy Now interviews Robert Meeropol, the son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the only U.S. citizens to be executed under the Espionage Act. He states:

Now, but it’s not surprising that the government would use conspiracy, whether it’s against my parents or whether it’s against the WikiLeaks people, because if you’re anybody who engages in conversation or discussion, and the government can get one person to testify that that discussion was to leak classified material, or to transmit information to the Soviet Union, in my parents case, they could be swept up in the dragnet. And you could get people to rat out their friends in order to get more lenient sentences. It sows distrust among the community of support. It scares other people into silence.

And so, what we see here is, if there is a criminal indictment for conspiracy, not an attack on just Julian Assange himself, but on the entire community of support that is seeking to promote the very revolutionary idea that the people have the right to know what their government is doing, that’s what this ultimately is all about. And every left-wing, every progressive organizer, every organizer, in general—how can you engage in organizing, in getting groups of people to protest and coordinating activities, without engaging in what the government would term a conspiracy? And so, it is a threat to all of us. And that is really why I issued my call for us to recognize this. This Espionage Act of 1917 has been the sword of Damocles, sitting quietly, mostly unused, ready to spring out and attack dissenters. And when you have it in the context of the growing secrecy that we face today ... and an authoritarian-oriented Supreme Court, it is a danger to us all.

The entire interview is very worth watching.

A newly released British document confirms that Israel has possessed nuclear weapons for more than three decades.

Secret files released by Britain's National Archives said on Wednesday that British officials feared Tel Aviv would use its nuclear weapons in case of another war with Arab countries in the region.

Israel, which is considered as the sole possessor of nuclear weapons in the Middle East, has never confirmed or denied that it has produced nuclear warheads. It has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and also adamantly rejected international inspection of its nuclear facilities. Former US President Jimmy Carter acknowledged for the first time in May 2008 that Tel Aviv has 150 nuclear warheads in its arsenals.

In 1986, Israeli nuclear technician, Mordechai Vanunu, leaked the news that Israel had between 100 and 200 nuclear weapons. Vanunu was a former worker at the country's Dimona nuclear reactor in the Negev desert.

In May 2010, the UK's Guardian newspaper said secret South African documents reveal that in 1975, Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to the then-apartheid regime in South Africa. According to documents obtained by the newspaper, a secret meeting between the then-Israeli defense minister, Shimon Peres, and his South African counterpart, P.W. Botha, ended with an offer for the sale of warheads “in three sizes.” The Guardian claimed that those “sizes” referred to conventional, chemical and nuclear weapons.

Israel has initiated several wars in the region in its 60-year-old history of occupation of Palestinian territories in the West Bank and East al-Quds (Jerusalem).

The United States has allocated billions of dollars to its nuclear weapons complex, despite agreeing to the New START treaty which demands a reduction of nuclear warheads. According to Newsweek, US President Barack Obama's administration has earmarked 84.5 billion dollar for modernizing America's nuclear arsenal over the next decade. That is an increase of at least 20 percent compared to money spent on nuclear laboratories during Obama's predecessor George W. Bush's tenure.

The new development comes months after Obama and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev signed a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) to reduce the number of their active nuclear warheads. The pact inked on April 8, 2010, would limit Washington and Moscow to a maximum of 1,550 deployed warheads each, about 30% down from the current level of 2,200.

These are not my wishes. I myself believe that our planet will be much safer without a Jewish state. I have only one wish for Israel, that it would become a state of its citizens.

The ACLU maintains an ever-growing database of these indignities, many so graphic they're illegal to broadcast over public airwaves. Actions that violate FCC standards are embraced by the TSA. "Mary in Texas" reported:

The TSA agent used her hands to feel under and between my breasts. She then rammed her hand up into my crotch until it jammed into my pubic bone ... I was touched in the pubic region in between my labia ... She then moved her hand across my pubic region and down the inner part of my upper thigh to the floor. She repeated this procedure on the other side. I was shocked and broke into tears.

A woman named Chris said:

"In the four times she explored the area where my inner thigh met my crotch, she touched my labia each time, and one pass made contact with my clitoris, through two layers of clothing. I told her I felt humiliated, assaulted and abused ... In my work as a nurse, if I did what the TSA did against a patient's will it would be considered assault and battery, and I did not see how the TSA should have different rules."

Recipients of such treatment aren't allowed to show distress. Melissa from Massachusetts did anyway:

"I was shaking and crying the entire time. I was begging them to hurry up but they kept stopping and telling me to calm down. It is impossible to gain composure when a stranger has her hands in your underwear."

British study shows conservatives' brains tend to have larger amygdalas, which responsible for primitive emotions. If the study is confirmed, it could give us the first medical explanation for why conservatives tend to be more receptive to threats of terrorism, for example, than liberals. And it may help to explain why conservatives like to plan based on the worst-case scenario, while liberals tend towards rosier outlooks. "It is very significant because it does suggest there is something about political attitudes that are either encoded in our brain structure through our experience or that our brain structure in some way determines or results in our political attitudes," Geraint Rees, the neurologist who carried out the study, told the media.

Simkanin had been experiencing weakness, chest pain, and had a large lump on his chest. He was 67 years old at the time of his death. [...] Dick Simkanin stood up for America, for all American workers and for all American Business owners when he decided in 2000 that his company was no longer going to participate in the withholding racquet, alleged, forced and demanded by law from Congress. Dick had spent 6 years researching American history and foundational principles. Ultimately he was spiritually convicted that he had no business being an unpaid bookkeeper for the Federal government, therefore, he had to give his workers 100% of their pay. How American of him! Thank God for Dicks' courage as it has cost him everything.

Two years after Israel’s aggression on the Gaza Strip (Operation Cast Lead), tens of thousands of Gaza residents continue to live a life of displacement. While the United Nations (UN) agencies and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have had the willingness and resources to support the re-construction of the houses Israel destroyed during the war, Israel continues to restrict the entry of construction materials, denying the victims from meaningful relief and from their right to adequate housing.

Directly after the military operations ended, the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki Moon, visited Gaza and expressed his outrage at the scenes of destruction the territory sustained due to Israeli attacks. Under-Secretary for Humanitarian Affairs, John Holmes, said that, in light of the devastation of infrastructure, “[I]t’s absolutely critical that these kinds of (construction) material now be allowed into Gaza on a regular and hopefully free basis.”1 Fourteen months later, in March 2010, Mr. Moon visited Gaza again and criticized the Israeli blockade that had continued to foil the efforts to re-build Gaza.

Hundreds of herbal medicinal products will be banned from sale in Britain next year under what campaigners say is a "discriminatory and disproportionate" European law. With four months to go before the EU-wide ban is implemented, thousands of patients face the loss of herbal remedies that have been used in the UK for decades. From 1 May 2011, traditional herbal medicinal products must be licensed or prescribed by a registered herbal practitioner to comply with an EU directive passed in 2004. The directive was introduced in response to rising concern over adverse effects caused by herbal medicines.

Of all the talk about S.510, virtually no one has actually read the language in the bill -- especially not those lawmakers who voted for it. The more you read from this bill, the more surreal it all becomes. For example, did you know there's a global FDA power grab agenda hidden in the Food Safety Modernization Act? Keep reading and I'll quote text straight out of the bill itself.

China is preparing for conflict 'in every direction', the defence minister said on Wednesday in remarks that threaten to overshadow a visit to Beijing by his US counterpart next month. "In the coming five years, our military will push forward preparations for military conflict in every strategic direction," said Liang Guanglie in an interview published by several state-backed newspapers in China. "We may be living in peaceful times, but we can never forget war, never send the horses south or put the bayonets and guns away," Mr Liang added. China repeatedly says it is planning a "peaceful rise" but the recent pace and scale of its military modernisation has alarmed many of its neighbours in the Asia-Pacific, including Japan which described China's military build-up as a "global concern" this month.

If you thought last week was as cold as you could bear it, brace yourself. Forecasters say the worst is yet to come, and this winter could be the harshest since the Thames froze over more than three centuries ago.

Temperatures for December are the coldest on record, with the average reading close to minus 1c – almost six degrees below normal.

And with forecasters warning that this winter’s ‘mini ice age’ might last until mid-March, this winter could be the worst since 1683-84 when a fair was held on the Thames.

Wendy McElroy: "Settled"? It's not even "Science"

Peninsula has an article based on a continuation of last week's interview with Julian Assange by Ahmed Mansour for Al Jazeera Arabic.

The interviewer, Ahmed Mansour, said at the start of the interview which was a continuation of last week’s interface, that Assange had even shown him the files that contained the names of some top Arab officials with alleged links with the CIA. ...

What is being published by the five media partners of WikiLeaks are only those details which they think are interesting for their readers. There are some Arab officials who are ‘stealing’ oil of their countries. “We need these media partners to focus more on this issue.”

[translate.google.com] The video surveillance at demonstrations is passé. This was decided by the Supreme Administrative Court in a landmark ruling. Cameras impaired right to demonstrate, the judges. Demonstrators may be filmed less in the future: The Supreme Administrative Court has in a landmark ruling, the video images of an anti-nuclear demonstration in Münster in June 2008, not declared to be legal. The ever-visible camera car police believe people from exercising their right to freedom of demonstration, the decision of 23 November. Citizens could have been deterred for fear of government monitoring of the participation in the event.

The French government has come up with a wizard wheeze which seems to be entirely designed to back the software giant Microsoft. In a Franco-American alliance, the likes of which has not been seen since the French backed a campaign by anti-democratic terrorists against its lawful government, the French are going to tax every tablet which does not come out with Windows software on-board. The logic is that if you are running Android, Linux or the MacOS you must be a pirate as Windows is the tool of choice for all decent minded French citizens.

The following photo essay provides a glimpse into the harsh living conditions of shanty-dwellers in central Colombo, Sri Lanka. The pictures were taken by photojournalist Shantan Kumarasamy.

Over 70,000 families or more than 50 percent of central Colombo’s population are to be removed and their homes demolished by the Sri Lankan government. The mass evictions are part of plans by President Mahinda Rajapakse to free-up nearly 390 hectares of prime inner city real estate and transform the country’s capital into a South Asian financial hub.

The government has placed the Urban Development Authority and the Land Reclamation and Development Board—two civilian bodies—under the authority of the defence ministry, which has already deployed soldiers and police to forcibly carry out evictions.

A number of shanty dwellers, with the assistance of the Socialist Equality Party, have formed an Action Committee to Defend the Right to Housing (ACDRH) and issued an appeal to all workers and youth to support their struggle to protect their homes. [More HERE.]

I'm going to do everything possible here to ensure that the focus remains on what matters: the way in which Wired, with no justification, continues to conceal this evidence and, worse, refuses even to comment on its content, thus blinding journalists and others trying to find out what really happened here, while enabling gross distortions of the truth by Poulsen's long-time confidant and source, the government informant Adrian Lamo.

The bottom line from Hansen and Poulsen is that they still refuse to release any further chat excerpts or, more inexcusably, to comment at all on -- to verify or deny -- Lamo's public statements about what Manning said to him that do not appear in those excerpts. They thus continue to conceal from the public 75% of the Manning-Lamo chats.

We, among many law abiding citizens of the world deplore and condemn, as applicable, your utterances and writings calling for the extra judicial ie unlawful: kidnapping/assassination/murder/physical harm of Julian Assange, his supporters, Wikileaks workers or members of Assange's family. We remind you of the laws in your country and others against incitement:

The US has clicked its all powerful fingers at Sweden, having demanded that it close down the Pirate Bay and other similar sites in Wikileak diplomatic cables, or suffer the consequences. An eagle eyed member of the SomethingAwful forums spotted that the States has been exerting its power and making demands within the IPRED legislation. The US was allegedly the driving force behind threats to Swedish ISPs in 2008, and it is currently the driving force behind the so-called “step two of the data retention”, presented by the Justice Minister last week.

The Democracy Index is an index compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit that measures the state of democracy in 167 countries. The Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index is based on 60 indicators grouped in five different categories: electoral process and pluralism, civil liberties, functioning of government, political participation and political culture. The Index was first produced in 2006, with updates produced in 2008 and 2010. According to the latest issue of the Index for 2010 Norway scored a total of 9.80 on a scale from zero to ten, which was the highest result, replacing Sweden which had the highest score in 2008, but slipped to fourth position in 2010. North Korea scored the lowest with 1.08, remaining at the bottom in 167th place, the same as in 2008. The Democracy Index for 2010 highlights the impact of the global financial crisis in 2008-09 on politics throughout most of the world, with the most significant changes happening in Europe. The Democracy Index score was lower in 2010 than in 2008 in 91 countries out of the 167 that are covered, although in the majority of these the deterioration was modest.

The countries are categorized into "Full Democracies", "Flawed Democracies", "Hybrid Regimes" and "Authoritarian Regimes" In 13 countries there was a change in regime type between 2008 and 2010; in 11 of these there was regression. Notably, negative political trends in France in recent years have resulted in the country being downgraded from a full democracy to the flawed democracy category.

Ambassador requests expeditious handling of and reply to the UAEG request, which was also raised by UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed in a February 23 meeting with Secretary Clinton in Washington.

¶3. (C/NF) Text of letter from GDSS to the Governor of the UAE Central Bank: Excellency Sultan Al-Suwiadi, UAE Central Bank Governor, Subject: Credit Cards

MC 5115-2600-1600-6190
MC 5115-2600-1600-5317
MC 5301-3800-3201-7106

General Management of The State Security offers greetings, and asks your Excellency to direct the money laundry and suspicious transactions unit at the Central Bank to urgently obtain details of the above credit cards, in addition to details for purchases, accounts, and payments on those cards, as the users of those cards were involved in the murder of Mahmoud Mabhouh. Those cards were issued by META BANK in the state of Iowa, USA.

CommonDreams: US Declined to Cooperate in Dubai Probe of Mabhouh Killing, WikiLeaks Shows

On December 27 and 28, 1985, US President Ronald Reagan delivered speeches assailing the Soviet war in Afghanistan to prop up the regime of Babrak Karmal against an Islamist insurgency funded and armed by Washington and Pakistan. Reagan’s comments were timed to coincide with the sixth anniversary of the 1979 entry of the Soviet military into Afghanistan.

Reagan said the Soviet invasion had produced an “utter hell” for Afghanistan. “These courageous people have shown the world that the Soviets can never achieve the outright subjugation of mind and spirit they seek,” Reagan said. He attacked the Soviets for their “barbaric methods of waging war” and for using “the full force of their modern weaponry” against the insurgents.

Of the insurgents—militant Islamists from Arab countries, including Osama bin Laden, among their ranks—Reagan spoke in the highest terms. These were noble fighters “who still fight on in the name of the ideals upon which our own nation was founded: freedom and independence,” he said.

The insurgency had broad popular support among the Pashtun tribes of the nation’s south and east, and the Soviet effort to defeat it appeared increasingly hopeless. Reagan said the US would serve as a “guarantor” of peace in Afghanistan-Pakistan region, but only if the Soviet army withdrew fully.

Another 17 people were killed today in a flurry of US drone strikes against the North Waziristan Agency, bringing the two day toll to 42 slain and an unknown number of people wounded. Officials have termed everyone killed a “suspected militant” but conceded that they don’t know any of the identities of the slain and that civilians are almost certain to be amongst the toll. With virtually no media allowed into the region, identifying the victims of US attacks is virtually impossible. But we do know the circumstances of the attacks, including that a number of the people killed yesterday were not in the targeted vehicles but were simply nearby when the missiles landed. Today, the first drone strike destroyed a home and the second strike targeted neighbors who went to the site of the home to look for survivors. The US has launched 115 strikes this year killing over a thousand people

Officials Keep Pressuring Pakistan to Do a Job that Can't Be Done. Speaking to the media today, a top US military commander in charge of securing the vast, mountainous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan admitted that there was literally no way for the US to actually accomplish this.

The commander, Col. Viet Luong, insisted that it would require more resources than the force has at its disposal to secure the border and that it would require far more cooperation from the tribes inside Pakistan than they have ever been able to secure. The admission will likely be of particular interest to Pakistan, as the US has been demanding that the Pakistani military seal the exact same border virtually since the 2001 occupation began, and is only now conceding that even the much more powerful US military can’t do what they’d been expecting Pakistan to do.

In the Silhouette Illusion (video at the bottom), a silhouetted woman is seen spinning on one foot, her leg extended. The appeal of the illusion is in the way the woman is spinning – she can be perceived as spinning clockwise or counter-clockwise.

A psychology professor has found that the way people perceive the Silhouette Illusion, a popular trick that went viral and has received substantial online attention, has little to do with the viewers' personality, or whether they are left- or right-brained, despite the fact that the illusion is often used to test these attributes in popular e-quizzes.

Instead, Niko Troje says that any reported preference for seeing the silhouette spinning clockwise rather than counter-clockwise is simply dependent upon the angle at which the viewer is seeing the image.

i-Pereception: The viewing-from-above bias and the silhouette illusion

As anger against the TSA has mounted, many have wondered if activists will be specifically targeted in an attempt to scare and intimidate them. No subject has been bigger than the gulf disaster and it looks as one of the groups who exposed the extensive use of Corexit9500 in the gulf have fallen victim to TSA tyranny.

When Matt Smith, Gavin Garrison, and Heather Rally of Project Gulf Impact arrived at Ontario Airport in California Tuesday evening to board a plane headed back to the Gulf of Mexico, all three of them were pulled aside by TSA agents and patted down. Coincidentally, they were the only three people pulled out of the security lines.

Matt was the first to be let goand he immediately began filming Gavin and Heather in the holding cell. As he was filming, a TSA Security officer walked up and began to yell at him to turn the camera off and was quoted as saying: “TSA doesn’t want stuff like this to end up on youtube”

An unprecedented disinformation campaign is being orchestrated to justify foreign intervention in the Ivory Coast to unseat the Preseident Laurent Gbagbo and replace him with Alassane Dramane Ouattara, a stooge totally devoted to the interests of multinationals. Alassane Ouattara is the former Deputy CEO of the IMF, and former Prime Minister of Houphouet-Boigny who in 1990 administered an IMF plan which plunged the Ivorian people into a profound social and economic distress. He is the puppet" nominated" by the major powers to lead the Ivory Coast and to ensure that their interests are not threatened by the presence of uncompromising and patriotic men such as Laurent Gbagbo, a long time opponent of Houphouet (1970-1990's.) French and American imperialist powers have agreed to remove Gbagbo who is guilty of pursuing a national policy prejudicial to their profits.

A classified cable released by WikiLeaks originating from the US embassy in Tel Aviv has revealed how members of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party asked Israel to attack its rival Hamas, which had won elections in January 2006. According to the dispatch, dated June 13, 2007, Yuval Diskin, the head of Shin Bet, Israel’s security agency, told the US ambassador to Israel at a meeting two days earlier that “demoralised” Fatah officials in Gaza had asked for help against Hamas. Diskin said, “They are approaching a zero-sum situation, and yet they ask us to attack Hamas. They are desperate. This is a new development. We have never seen this before”. He was also quoted as saying, “Fatah is in a very bad shape in Gaza. We have received requests to train their forces in Egypt and Yemen. We would like to get them to get the training they need, and to be more powerful, but they do not have anyone to lead them”.

Four activists were forced to leave an art gallery in New York this month for wearing T-shirts promoting an effort to include an American boat in the next blockade-challenging Gaza flotilla. The incident came on the final day of an exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery called “Next Year in Jerusalem,” featuring pieces by the German artist Anselm Kiefer on the subject of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. The T-shirts worn by the activists repeated the show’s title, which is borrowed from a Jewish prayer, in English, Hebrew and Arabic, on the front and said “U.S. Boat to Gaza” and “The Audacity of Hope” on the back. (As The Lede explained in a previous post, the American activists plan to call their boat the Audacity of Hope, echoing the title of a book by President Obama.)

Yet more evidence that Wired is just a U. S. intelligence asset (as is all the mainstream media, but not always so clumsily):

"For more than six months, Wired's Senior Editor Kevin Poulsen has possessed - but refuses to publish - the key evidence in one of the year's most significant political stories: the arrest of U.S. Army PFC Bradley Manning for allegedly acting as WikiLeaks' source. In late May, Adrian Lamo - at the same time he was working with the FBI as a government informant against Manning - gave Poulsen what he purported to be the full chat logs between Manning and Lamo in which the Army Private allegedly confessed to having been the source for the various cables, documents and video that WikiLeaks released throughout this year. In interviews with me in June, both Poulsen and Lamo confirmed that Lamo placed no substantive restrictions on Poulsen with regard to the chat logs: Wired was and remains free to publish the logs in their entirety.

Despite that, on June 10, Wired published what it said was only "about 25 percent" of those logs, excerpts that it hand-picked. For the last six months, Poulsen has not only steadfastly refused to release any further excerpts, but worse, has refused to answer questions about what those logs do and do not contain. This is easily one of the worst journalistic disgraces of the year: it is just inconceivable that someone who claims to be a 'journalist' - or who wants to be regarded as one - would actively conceal from the public, for months on end, the key evidence in a political story that has generated headlines around the world."

[...] Greenwald goes on to detail the strange hold the U. S. government appears to have on Poulsen and Lamo, both through the same former top U.S. Justice Department prosecutor named Mark Rasch, a guy who now looks all the world like a covert American government operative. [...] It is clear that Wired is actively participating in the American government scheme to use a bastardization of the facts surrounding Manning and Assange to concoct a bogus legal case against Assange.

The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) has been implicated in war crimes involving torture and the illicit trade in human organs, including those removed from Serb civilians taken captive and killed during and after NATO’s 1999 war against Yugoslavia.

The report states that the Yellow House served as a “way station for those taken captive for organ trafficking.” It continues: “The end point was the detention centre in Fushe–Kruje, a two-storey farmhouse set back from main roads but in close proximity to Tirana Airport, where the organs could be shipped abroad.”

There are substantial “elements of proof” that a small number of captives were killed at the Yellow House, including witness accounts from people who saw the burial, disinterment, movement and reburial of captives’ corpses. Captives were killed by a gunshot to the head before the operation to remove one or more organs took place. The principal trade was in kidneys.

The CIA and European intelligence agencies backed the KLA and used it as a cat’s paw to facilitate the plans of the US, using NATO as its military umbrella, to complete the dismemberment of Yugoslavia and undermine Serbia, a long-time ally of Russia.

Padilla was convicted of aiding terrorists in 2007 and was sentenced to 17 years, 4 months in prison. While awaiting trial, reports surfaced that he was being tortured for information with the use of sensory deprivation for weeks at a time. For 1,307 days, Padilla was kept in a 9' x 7' cell with no natural light, clock or calendar. When Padilla left his cell, he was shackled and fitted with heavy goggles and headphones. His counsel argues that while he was being interrogated Padilla was subjected to harsh lights and pounding sounds. While meeting with his counsel, they reported Padilla exhibiting facial tics, random eye movements and unusual contortions of his body. According to them, Padilla had become so "shattered" that he became convinced his lawyers were part of a continuing interrogation program and saw his captors as protectors.

In January 2008, the BBC aired a Horizon special entitled "Total Isolation." The premise of the show centered around 6 individuals who agreed to be shut inside a cell in a nuclear bunker, alone and in the dark. Prior to isolation, the volunteers underwent tests of visual memory, information processing, verbal fluency and suggestibility. After, they spent two days and two nights in isolation. The subjects noted that their inability to sense time and the hallucinations and visions that they experienced made the 48 hours inside the cell very difficult on their mind.

Around 16 minutes into the Frost interview Assange starts to consider to conspiratorial elements of the Swedish attack on him, including the role of mega-weirdo Claes Borgström, heavily connected in Swedish politics - a prominent Social Democrat - and big business, in making a rape case out of facts already completely dismissed by a senior Swedish prosecutor (Borgström seems to have made a career out of using his bizarre ultra-feminism as a cover for looking out for Establishment interests). Assange briefly mentions the cynical political manipulation by the Swedish Social Democrats concerning a faked promise to withdraw from Afghanistan, something I haven't yet seen in released cables, although American control of Swedish political decision-making has leaked (as has the writing [original] of Swedish intellectual property legislation to benefit American corporations, the unconstitutional and secret sharing of information on Swedish citizens with the Americans, and the fact that Sweden, proudly independent, is a de facto member of NATO, not to mention a complete American lapdog).

[Photo is from another US atrocity] As part of an escalating US campaign in Pakistan, missiles from suspected CIA drones killed up to 25 people on Monday. The latest slaughter took place in the North Waziristan region, which borders Afghanistan and has been targeted by the majority of US missiles fired from unmanned aircraft over the past year. The region is said to be a stronghold of the so-called Haqqani network, which operates in Afghanistan and opposes the US occupation. The Los Angeles Times, citing “Pakistani intelligence officials,” reported that 25 were killed after three trucks were incinerated in two separate attacks in Mir Ali, a city that lies close to the border with Afghanistan. The attacks in North Waziristan followed by 10 days the killing of 54 in the Kyber tribal region, located further to the north along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. As always, those killed were described by Pakistani officials and the US media as “suspected militants” or “terrorists,” even though no concrete information was provided about those killed. The US did not make any comment on the killings.

Antiwar: US Drone Strikes Kill 25 in North Waziristan
The News: All Pakistani Parties Demand End to Drone Attacks

27 December 2010, marks the two-year anniversary of the beginning of Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s 23 day offensive on the Gaza Strip. This offensive – the single most brutal event in the history of the occupation – was characterised by systematic violations of international law. Its aftermath has been characterised by pervasive impunity. In total, 1,419 Palestinians were killed. 83% of the dead – the overwhelming majority – were civilians, the so-called 'protected persons’ of international humanitarian law. A further 5,300 were injured, and public and private property throughout the Gaza Strip was extensively targeted and destroyed. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) notes that in the two years since the offensive there have been no concrete steps taken towards the fulfilment of victims’ legitimate rights to the equal protection of the law and an effective judicial remedy. Customary international law and the treaty-based obligations which all States have entered into are unequivocal: if a war crime has been committed, those responsible must be investigated and prosecuted in accordance with international standards. They must be held to account. Numerous reports of international and national human rights organisations – including those of the UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict (the 'Goldstone Report’), the Independent Fact-Finding Mission mandated by the Arab League, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch – concluded that war crimes were committed in the Gaza Strip, and noted that criminal accountability must be the legal consequence. The Goldstone Report detailed explicit mechanisms to ensure such criminal accountability.

Israeli prime minister has ruled out the idea of a full-fledged Palestinian state and refugees' right to return to their homeland. On Monday, Benjamin Netanyahu said Tel Aviv would not divide al-Quds (Jerusalem) -- the eastern part of which is wanted by the Palestinians as the capital of their future state, AFP reported. Netanyahu said he wanted a demilitarized Palestinian state. The Israeli premier also said he wanted Palestinians to renounce refugees' right to return to their homes. The Palestinian Authority (PA) has rejected the Israeli proposals. Israel fabricated its existence in 1948 during full-scale military offensives against the Arab world, forcing 711,000 Palestinians to leave their homeland. 2008 estimates put the number of Palestinian refugees at over 4.6 million.

A counter-terrorism consultant told a meeting of law enforcement officials that the way to combat militant Muslims is to "kill them ... including the children," says a news report. Walid Shoebat, a self-described "former PLO terrorist" who "now speaks out for USA and Israel," reportedly made the comment at a speech during a conference of the International Counter-Terrorism Officers Association in Las Vegas this past October, according to the Huffington Post's Chip Berlet. The comment highlights growing concerns among human rights advocates that US law enforcement is turning to extremists for training in the fight against terrorism. It also highlights concerns among senior counter-terrorism officials that standards for counter-terror training are inappropriate, and possibly harming national security.

A US study found that Neanderthals, prehistoric cousins of humans, ate grains and vegetables as well as meat, cooking them over fire in the same way homo sapiens did.

The new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) challenges a prevailing theory that Neanderthals' over reliance on meat contributed to their extinction around 30,000 years ago. Researchers found grains from numerous plants, including a type of wild grass, as well as traces of roots and tubers, trapped in plaque buildup on fossilized Neanderthal teeth unearthed in northern Europe and Iraq. Many of the particles "had undergone physical changes that matched experimentally-cooked starch grains, suggesting that Neanderthals controlled fire much like early modern humans," PNAS said in a statement. Stone artifacts have not provided evidence that Neanderthals used tools to grind plants, suggesting they did not practice agriculture, but the new research indicates they cooked and prepared plants for eating, it said.

Science News: Neandertal relative bred with humans