Yemenis demand release of Guantanamo detainees

The U.S. government has begun notifying lawyers of Guantanamo Bay prisoners if the men they represent are being force-fed to prevent them from starving to death in a hunger strike that has dragged on for more than two months, though its extent remains in dispute. Cori Crider, a lawyer for Yemeni prisoner Samir Mukbel, said she received notification from the Department of Justice late last week that her client was being force-fed and was permitted to speak with him by phone Monday to confirm the report. Crider, who works for the British legal rights group Reprieve, said Mukbel told her he joined the hunger strike in February, has lost about 30 pounds and at one point fainted and had to be hospitalized at the prison on the U.S. base in Cuba. He described the feeding process as painful.

Mukbel is not facing any charges, according to his lawyer, and is one of about two dozen Yemenis at Guantanamo who have been cleared for transfer but cannot be sent back to their own country because the Obama administration believes the country's security and political situation is too dicey to prevent former militants from attacking the U.S. or its allies.

Speaking today in Jerusalem, US Secretary of State John Kerry insisted that the Obama Administration would “not hesitate” to launch a military strike on Iran if it decides that diplomacy has failed in the ongoing dispute over Iran’s civilian nuclear program. “No option is off the table. No option will be taken off the table,” Kerry added, saying that the international desire for diplomacy would not be allowed to “stand in the way” of attacking Iran.

Julian Assange says 1973-76 reports, including many by Henry Kissinger, show vast range and scope of US Activity. - WikiLeaks has published more than 1.7m US records covering diplomatic or intelligence reports on every country in the world. The data, which has not been leaked, comprises diplomatic records from the beginning of 1973 to the end of 1976, covering a variety of diplomatic traffic including cables, intelligence reports and congressional correspondence. Julian Assange said WikiLeaks had been working for the past year to analyse and assess a vast amount of data held at the US national archives before releasing it in a searchable form.

The controversial former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was influential in a set of major political upheavals at the time of her premiership in the 1980’s, which openly contradict the image of a reformist neoliberal political leader the current British government is trumpeting.

Thatcher was one of the main supporters of toppled Iraqi dictator Saddam during the Iraqi-imposed war on Iran in the 1980’s. Despite her government being officially neutral in the Iran-Iraq war, and having voted for a UN Security Council resolution calling on all countries not to further escalate the conflict, she was hungry for selling arms to Saddam’s government. Secret files made public in December 2011 unveiled an exhaustive list of equipment from Hawk fighter jets to military air and naval bases that London was attempting to sell the Iraqi regime as early as 1981 under the pretext that they were “non-lethal”.

Thomas Jones: Blair’s Thatcher, Thatcher’s Blair
Chris Floyd: A Chronicle of Thatcherism's Horrors Foretold
Owen Jones: Thatcherism was a national catastrophe that still poisons us

Julie Hyland & Chris Marsden: Thatcher’s legacy - Margaret Thatcher, the friend of Chile’s fascist dictator General Augusto Pinochet and supporter of the apartheid system of racial discrimination in South Africa, has died of a stroke at the age of 87. Neither the media’s eulogies to Thatcher as a great stateswoman, nor the staging of a day of national mourning complete with military honours, can conceal the fact that she died arguably the most hated figure in British politics. [Ordinary people] will have greeted the announcement of her demise with cold indifference, contempt, and, in some cases, celebration. Impromptu street parties were underway in several cities within hours of her death. [...] Margaret Hilda Roberts embodied everything that is narrow-minded and philistine in the English middle class. She was preoccupied solely with self-advancement and enrichment, owing much of her success to having secured a rich husband. Her political talents, such as they were, consisted of the nasty cunning and ruthlessness of the social climber.

Syria will not accept a chemical weapons team, as proposed by U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon, to probe the alleged use of chemical weapons in the country's conflict, the foreign ministry said on Monday. - Ban has "suggested a supplementary mission allowing the mission to deploy throughout Syrian territory, which is contrary to the demand Syria made to the United Nations," a ministry official said, cited by state news agency SANA. He said "Syria can not accept such manoeuvres on the part of the U.N. secretariat general, bearing in mind the negative role that it played in Iraq and which cleared the way to the American invasion" of that country in 2003. The foreign ministry "regretted" that Ban had "given in to pressure from states known for their support of the bloodshed" in Syria, he said, referring to supporters of the two-year-old revolt in the country.

PressTV: Ban calls on Israel regime to join CWC

Buildings are in tatters and fallen drainpipes lay across the road after fierce fighting in Deir al-Zor in the war-torn country. - A child wanders among debris in a street ravaged by bomb blasts in a once-bustling town in Syria. Buildings are in tatters and fallen drainpipes lay across the road after fierce fighting in Deir al-Zor in the war-torn country. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has called on foreign powers to take action as violence keeps escalating between rebels and tyrant President Bashar Assad’s forces. It’s feared 70,000 people have been killed in the two-year uprising against Assad, half a million people have become refugees and 1.2million homes have been destroyed.

As the European Union's wealthiest country, Luxembourg could have been forgiven for thinking that it would never find itself on the bloc's financial risk list. - With just half a million people living on a tiny patch of lush land nestled between Belgium, France and Germany, Luxembourg is as tranquil as a buzzing financial center gets. Still, some of Europe's regulators and politicians have started wondering aloud whether its banks might be holding the 17-nation eurozone's next ticking bomb. Following the chaotic bailout for Cyprus last week, European officials have been drawing worrying comparisons between the two countries' oversized financial industries. Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, cautioned on Thursday that "the recent experience shows that countries where the banking sector is several times bigger than the economy are countries that, on average, have more vulnerabilities." "Financial shocks hit these countries stronger, simply because of the size of their banking sector."

■ A top-secret report compiled at the behest of the Finance Ministry in Athens has come to the conclusion that Germany owes Greece billions in World War II reparations. The total could be enough to solve the country's debt problems, but the Greek government is wary of picking a fight with its paymaster.
■ The headline on Sunday's issue of the Greek newspaper To Vima made it clear what is at stake: "What Germany Owes Us," it read. The article below outlined possible reparations payments Athens might demand from Germany resulting from World War II. A panel of experts, commissioned by the Greek Finance Ministry, spent months working on the report -- an 80-page file classified as "top secret."
■ Now, though, the first details of the report have been leaked to the public. According to To Vima, the commission arrived at a clear conclusion: "Greece never received any compensation, either for the loans it was forced to provide to Germany or for the damages it suffered during the war."
■ The research is based on 761 volumes of archival material, including documents, agreements, court decisions and legal texts. Panagiotis Karakousis, who heads the group of experts, told To Vima that the researchers examined 190,000 pages of documents, which had been scattered across public archives, often stored in sacks thrown in the basements of public buildings.

Tο Βήμα: Οσα μας χρωστούν οι Γερμανοί...
Tο Βήμα: Διπλωματικές ενέργειες της Ελλάδας για τις γερμανικές αποζημιώσεις
Tο Βήμα: Der Spiegel: 162 δισ. ευρώ χρωστάει η Γερμανία στην Ελλάδα
ValueWalk.com: Germany Owes Greece Over €100B in Reparations [REPORT]

Last week, we wrote about an organization that was unhappy that a Wikipedia article no longer existed. Now we have the opposite problem: an organization unhappy because a Wikipedia article does exist. And not just any organization, but the "Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intéieur" (Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence, DCRI), a French intelligence agency, which suddenly decided that an article about a military base contained classified information, and wanted it deleted.

■ On 4 March 2013, the Wikimedia Foundation (the “Foundation”) was contacted by the Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur (“DCRI”), a French intelligence agency. The DCRI claimed that an article entitled “La station hertzienne militaire de Pierre sur Haute” on the French language Wikipedia contains classified military information and that publication of such information violates French Penal Code, Article 413-10. The DCRI demanded removal of the article in its entirety without any further substantive explanation.
■ We requested more information from the DCRI, such as which specific sentences or sections they believed to contain classified information. Unfortunately, the DCRI refused to provide any more specific detail and reaffirmed their demand that the entire article be deleted. Therefore, the Foundation was forced to refuse their request pending receipt of more information that we could use to fully evaluate their claim.
■ On 30 March 2013, we discovered that the DCRI, evidently dissatisfied with the Foundation’s response, contacted a volunteer with administrative rights (a “sysop”) who resides in France. This sysop is not responsible for the hosting of the content on Wikipedia, had no role in the creation of the article, and is not part of the Wikimedia Foundation. As we understand it, the sysop attempted to explain his limited role as a volunteer and directed them back to the Foundation’s legal department.
■ Unfortunately, the DCRI did not accept this answer and insisted that the sysop use his administrative rights to immediately remove the article, or face serious and immediate reprisals. Under the shadow of these threats, the sysop removed the article as directed. We are reaching out to the sysop and, to the extent he wishes, intend to support him to the best of our ability during this frightening experience.

Ontario is on the verge of becoming the first industrial region in North America to eliminate all coal-fired electrical generation. Here’s how Canada’s most populous province did it – and what the US can learn from it. - Next year, though, Ontario is scheduled to complete a 21st century environmental cleanup project that distinguishes it among North American jurisdictions. After a decade of work by the Liberal Party government, Ontario at the end of this year is scheduled to close the last of its big coal-fired generators, and leave a single small coal-fired unit available during periods of peak electrical demand until it closes next year. In shutting down the province’s 19 boilers fueled by coal, Ontario will become the first industrial region on the continent to eliminate coal-fired generation. The decade-long process to replace a quarter of the province’s electrical generating capacity with new plants fueled by natural gas and renewable energy sources represents one of the most ambitious low-carbon generating strategies in the world. And achieving the coal-less electricity sector has yielded lessons about the constraints of government policy and public acceptance in an industrial democracy seeking to make such a momentous transition.