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I am found of what happens in Middle East. Here I recollect and comment such eventsa.
Reasons Why Palestinians Can Be Hopeful on Nakba Day, 2013 (By Rima Najjar Merriman) - 20-may-2013
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May 18 2013- "Calamity either destroys a people or makes it stronger. In the past half century Palestinians have transformed catastrophe into strength. They have done so through education and through their exposure to the world. They have done so by rebuilding their shattered lives in exile, by recovering their history, folklore, customs and costumes." 1) More and more voices by international activists are being raised in solidarity with Palestinians, and these voices are knifing through the Israeli hasbara that is increasingly becoming a laughing stock around the world – bringing the conflict back to its roots, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 by Jewish colonialists and projecting that narrative into an understanding of the present. These voices are giving Palestinians hope, despite the incredibly bleak and apparently blind international political scene...
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4 Inhumane Realities about the Guantanamo Hunger Strike (By Steven Hsieh) - 20-may-2013
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May 18, 2013- Friday marks 100 days since the beginning of the hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay that has recaptured international attention on the offshore prison President Obama promised to close when seeking office five years ago. As of Thursday, military officials say that 102 out of 166 detainees are participating in the strike. Lawyers say that number is closer to 130. Since the hunger strike began 100 days ago, international groups including the European Parliament, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and several nations with detainees at GITMO have stepped up pressure on the Obama administration to release detainees or close the prison altogether. As the strike continues past its 100th day, here are four of the most disturbing facts about the situation at Guantanamo...
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Europe presses US on drones – not to cease, but to share (By Chris Cole) - 20-may-2013
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May 18, 2013- European countries are piling more pressure on the US to allow them to buy armed Predator and Reaper drones. As we have previously reported Germany wants to buy armed Reaper drones from the US and France too has reported this week that it 'expects’ the US to allow it to acquire unarmed Reapers as a step towards it aim of acquiring armed drone capability. Italy meanwhile is getting frustrated with a lack of response from the US to its request to arm the unarmed Reaper that it currently operates...
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My Body in Shatat, My Heart in Gaza, My Soul in Beit Daras (By Ghada Ageel) - 20-may-2013
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May 18, 2013- On the 65th anniversary of the Nakba (what we Palestinians call the catastrophe of dispossession), Palestinians who were born in historic Palestine and are currently growing old in refugee camps – remain determined to return to the homes and lands from which we were expelled in 1948. My grandmother, Khadija, is one of them. A mother of ten, a grandmother of 68, and a great grandmother of 49, Khadija now lives under tragic circumstances in Khan Younis refugee camp, in Gaza. She previously owned lands and a home in Beit Daras, a village that was part of historic Palestine. (She still have deeds in hand). Once full of hope and honor, my grandmother is very much like the other seven million Palestinian refugees and their descendants scattered all over the world, including in Occupied Palestine. In her late 80s, she feels abandoned...
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Reagan and Argentina’s Dirty War (By Robert Parry) - 20-may-2013
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May 18, 2013 - The death of ex-Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla, a mastermind of the right-wing state terrorism that swept Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, means that one more of Ronald Reagan’s old allies is gone from the scene. Videla, who fancied himself a theoretician of anti-leftist repression, died in prison at age 87 after being convicted of a central role in the Dirty War that killed some 30,000 people and involved kidnapping the babies of "disappeared" women so they could be raised by military officers who were often implicated in the murders of the mothers... To pull off the trick, however, required collaborators in the U.S. news media who would defend the junta and heap ridicule on anyone who alleged that the thousands upon thousands of "disappeared" were actually being systematically murdered. One such ally was Ronald Reagan, who used his platform as a newspaper and radio commentator in the late 1970s to minimize the human rights crimes underway in Argentina – and to counter the Carter administration’s human rights protests...
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Palestinian Activists Demolish Part of Israeli Apartheid Wall near Ramallah (Palestine News Network) - 20-may-2013
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May 18, 2013- On Friday 17th May, a group of young Palestinians and activists from the popular resistance movements demolished part of the Israeli apartheid wall in Abu Deis village near Ramallah. One of the activists told PNN that dozens of Palestinians protested near the Israeli apartheid wall that was constructed between the Abu Deis and Al-Eizariya villages and that a number of youngsters demolished part of the wall. He said that Israeli forces arrived to the area and started firing metal-coated bullets and tear gas canisters toward the protesters...
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FBI Twists History
'Terror' War Gets Stupider as Shakur is Added to the List (by: Linn Washington Jr.) - 20-may-2013
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May 18, 2013- Federal authorities publicly plot encouraging bounty hunters to kidnap a fugitive black radical from a foreign country for return to prison in the U.S. to achieve long-delayed justice. This sounds like the FBI action on May 2, 2013 in placing former Black Panther and Black Liberation Army member Assata Shakur on its "Most Wanted Terrorists" list – the first female to have that dubious distinction. Shakur was convicted of killing a New Jersey State Trooper during a May 1973 incident on the NJ turnpike, where one of her companions was killed and another captured. Once known as JoAnne Chesimard, she escaped from a NJ prison in 1979 and was granted political asylum in Cuba in 1984 where she lives today. While Shakur,65, occasionally criticizes racist inequities in the U.S. – comparable to that of many politicians including Barack Obama prior to this election of U.S. President – she does not actively advocate or engage in terrorism. ..
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4 Inhumane Realities about the Guantanamo Hunger Strike (By Steven Hsieh) - 20-may-2013
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May 18, 2013- Friday marks 100 days since the beginning of the hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay that has recaptured international attention on the offshore prison President Obama promised to close when seeking office five years ago. As of Thursday, military officials say that 102 out of 166 detainees are participating in the strike. Lawyers say that number is closer to 130. Since the hunger strike began 100 days ago, international groups including the European Parliament, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and several nations with detainees at GITMO have stepped up pressure on the Obama administration to release detainees or close the prison altogether. As the strike continues past its 100th day, here are four of the most disturbing facts about the situation at Guantanamo...
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Armed groups bomb Libyan military posts in Benghazi (Reuters) - 20-may-2013
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May 18, 2013 - Armed groups attacked military posts in Libya's second city Benghazi with bombs and a rocket-propelled grenade, an army commander said on Saturday. Nearly two years after the uprising that ended Muammar Gaddafi's 42-year rule, the government still exerts little control over the armed brigades that helped overthrow him. Oil-producer Libya is largely split into fiefdoms of such brigades that are competing for influence...
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FBI director continues cover-up of contacts with Boston bombing suspects (By Barry Grey) - 20-may-2013
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May 18, 2013- In testimony before the US Senate Thursday, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Robert Mueller continued the official cover-up of the advance warnings and extensive contacts between the FBI and other intelligence and security agencies and the suspects in the April 15 bombings at the Boston Marathon. The detonation of two bombs in downtown Boston resulted in three deaths and the wounding of more than 160 runners and spectators. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was killed by police in a shootout four days after the bombings. His younger brother Dzhokhar is being held in a prison hospital in Massachusetts on charges of using a weapon of mass destruction...
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Palestinians in Egypt exiled, forgotten (By AYA BATRAWY) - 20-may-2013
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May 18, 2013 — In 1948, Suleiman Mamoudi fled by foot with his parents and other families from their village of Bir el-Sabae in Palestine. The 28-year-old and his family walked west for several hundred miles, crossing the Sinai Peninsula before settling in an area around 90 miles (145 kilometers) north of Cairo. They had not planned to stay long in Egypt's Sharqiya province, until they found themselves unable to return home after the Jewish takeover of their city, renamed Beersheba. Mamoudi, now 93 years old, is among some 3,000 Palestinians living in the impoverished village of Gezirat al-Fadel. He spends his days sitting on a cushion on the ground outside his sparsely furnished two-bedroom, mud brick home. The dirt roads make it difficult for him to walk with his cane...
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Pentagon Spec Ops Chief Sees ’10 to 20′ More Years of War Against al-Qaida (By Spencer Ackerman) - 20-may-2013
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May 18, 2013 - The war in Afghanistan may be winding down. But the Pentagon’s chief of irregular warfare still sees a war against al-Qaida that will last decades, all over the world — a prospect that prompted astonishment and constitutional debate in the Senate.Asked at a Senate hearing today how long the war on terrorism will last, Michael Sheehan, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, answered, "At least 10 to 20 years."It was just two months ago that the top U.S. intelligence official testified that al-Qaida had been battered by the U.S. into a state of disarray. A year ago, the current CIA director, John Brennan, said that "For the first time since this fight began, we can look ahead and envision a world in which the al Qaeda core is simply no longer relevant." Just this week, the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, Army Lt. Gen. Joseph Votel, told a Florida conference that he was looking at missions beyond the counterterrorism manhunt...
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Israeli Soldiers Break Into The Negev Detention Camp, Attack Detainees (Saed Bannoura) - 20-may-2013
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May 18, 2013 - The Palestinian Detainees Study Center has reported that undercover forces of the Israeli military broke, on Thursday, into section 24 of the Negev detention camp, attacked the detainees and searched their beds and property. Riyadh Al-Ashqar, head of the center, issued a press release on Friday stating that the attack took place on Thursday at night, approximately at 10, when dozens of soldiers forced the detainees out of their tents, forced them into the external toilets, and searched their tents for more than one hour...
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Syria News - May 17, 2013 (Warning: Graphic Videos) (Local Coordination Committees of Syria + Videos) - 20-may-2013
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May 17, 2013 -
By the end of Friday, the local coordination committees documentated 113 martyrs between 7 women, 4 children and 1 martyr under torture: 39 martyrs were reported in Damascus and its suburbs; 17 martyrs in Idlib; 15 martyrs in Homs, inlcuding 3 unidentified martyred in Damascus suburbs; 14 in Deir Ezzor; 8 in Hama; 8 in Daraa; 8 in Aleppo; 2 in Raqqa; and 2 in Hassakeh.The committees have documented 323 points of shelling as 32 warplane air strikes were recorded, fiercest of which was in Yabroud, Damascus Suburbs, shelling with explosive barrels was recorded in 3 points: Yabroud in Damascus Suburbs, and Helfaya and Fletah in Hama, also the use of thermobaric and cluster bombs were documented in Helfaya. Shelling with mortars was recorded in 103 points, and artillery shelling in 95 points, whole rocket shelling was recorded in 88 points in different Syrian cities and towns...
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Obama Worse Than Nixon? Pentagon Papers Attorney Decries AP Phone Probe, Julian Assange Persecution (Democracy Now!) - 20-may-2013
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May 17, 2013 - The Justice Department’s disclosure that it had secretly subpoenaed phone records from the Associated Press has prompted a wave of comparisons between President Obama and Richard Nixon. Four decades ago, the Nixon administration attempted to block The New York Times from publishing a secret history of the Vietnam War leaked to the newspaper by whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. Two days after the Times first published excerpts of what became known as the "Pentagon Papers," the Nixon government asked for and received a Supreme Court injunction against the newspaper, arguing that publication of the documents posed a "grave and immediate danger to the security of the United States." We speak to James Goodale, the general counsel at The New York Times during the Pentagon Papers crackdown. ,,
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Military Resistance 11E11: Watching You (Thomas F Barton) - 20-may-2013
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May 17, 2013 - For the second time this month, a uniformed military official whose job was to prevent sex abuse has come under investigation for a sex crime.
Agents from the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division were looking into allegations that an Army sergeant first class at Fort Hood,Texas, sexually abused females in his unit and ran a prostitution ring on the base, Pentagon officials said Tuesday night. Officials said that the soldier, who was not identified, had been assigned as an Equal Opportunity Adviser and Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention (SHARP) program coordinator at Fort Hood with the Army’s III Corps when the allegations surfaced...
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Israel Continues to Detain Gazans At Border Crossing (By: Khaled Kraizim) - 20-may-2013
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May 17, 2013 - "It was silent save for the whispers of praise, the recitations of the Quran and the shuffling feet of some Israeli soldiers. All of a sudden, while we were waiting for permission to traverse the crossing that separates Gaza from Israel, they took my husband without reason! "I don’t deny that I was in a state of fearful anticipation. Questions build in my mind and my heart began to race faster and faster. My eye continued to hurt me but I did not let this show. Fate had decreed that I would spend that night experiencing a harsh reality. Voices grew nearer and the shuffle of feet marked the arrival of the last of the soldiers. They had taken my husband to a faraway place, and later I learned that they had detained him." Um Yousef Maarouf lost all hope of treating her eye after the Israeli occupation detained her husband Zahir at the Beit Hanoun-Erez crossing in the northern part of the Gaza Strip last week...
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Drone Pilots Expose Politicians' Lies (By David Swanson) - 20-may-2013
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May 17, 2013 - Our elected and unelected officials tell us that drone strikes target top level enemies of the United States who are imminent threats to us, and that killing innocent people is avoided altogether or minimized. Congressional hearings, with a couple of excellent exceptions, question outside academics about the legality of this purported strategy. The Obama administration declines to send any witnesses. But drone pilots have begun talking to the media. And they describe policies that bear a lot closer resemblance to reporting from the areas where the missiles strike. These pilots should be brought before Congress...
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Libya : Tawerghans say mass grave bodies mis-identified, demand neutral investigation (By Ahmed Elumami.) - 20-may-2013
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Exhumed bodies found in a mass grave discovered earlier this week are not civilians from Misrata but are people from Tawergha, the town’s local council in exile has said, demanding that a neutral committee be formed to investigate the grave. The head of the Tawergha refugee camp in Tripoli, Ali Arrous, told the Libya Herald that the displaced people of Tawergha do not trust the research team of the Ministry of Martyrs and Missing People.Tawerghan refugees, he said, are demanding that a neutral committee be formed to investigate the cemetery. This, he said, should consist of members of the Red Cross and the UN mission in Libya to fully investigate the mass grave."The cemetery is about 300 years old," Arrous said, "but the bodies in this grave were victims of a NATO airstrike. They were martyrs." He added that the Tawerghans have witnesses, including those who actually buried the bodies on 11 August 2011...
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Corruption has no bounds in Iraq (By Fatih Abdulsalam) - 19-may-2013
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May 17, 2013 -The corruption in Iraq has turned into a phenomenon, which is certain to be there for generations to come. The only way to put an end to it is through the formation of a national unity government that will make fighting corruption its top priority. There are two tiers of corruption in Iraq and both are intimately related. Financial and political corruption are intertwined and have become two sides of the same coin...Corruption takes place at the expense of the most vulnerable in the society. It is the poor, the homeless, the downtrodden, the orphans, the widows and the elderly who are bearing the brunt of corruption in Iraq....
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DNA Tests Needed to Identify Bodies Found in Mass Graves in Iraq (Prensa Latina) - 19-may-2013
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May 17, 2013 - Deputy Governor in the Western Iraqi province of Al Anbar, Sadun Obaid al-Shalan, today called for using DNA tests to identify about a thousand bodies found in three mass graves on Thursday. Security forces and human rights organizations found the mass graves with containing around a thousand bodies in the northern city of Fallujah, and it appears that they were killed en masse in summary executions by U.S. occupation forces, said Sadun Obaid al-Shalan. Fallujah put up strong resistance in 2004 when U.S. troops were sent to occupy the city, which was almost completely destroyed after the fighting. After entering the town, the U.S. troops unleashed a fierce reprisal against male residents considered suspects for having participated in the resistance....
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A Saudi, a pressure cooker and the FBI… (Ali Khan Mahmudabad) - 19-may-2013
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May 17, 2013 - What do you get when you put a Saudi student, the FBI and a 'bullet coloured’ pressure cooker together? Kabsah! Talal al-Rouqi, an Arab student in Michigan had cooked his favourite rice and meat dish, Kabsah (also know as Mandi) and was walking over to share it with his other Arab friend when a neighbor spotted him strolling in public with a 'bullet coloured’ pressure cooker. Naturally, worried about the swarthy looking young man’s intentions, especially given the Tsarnaev brother’s use of the pressure cooker as a bomb container, the conscious citizen decided to report the incident to the FBI. Armed agents surrounded the Al-Rouqi’s apartment, asked to enter the premises and then quizzed him on his sojourn of two days earlier...In another incident a Saudi man who was being held for irregularities to do with his passport was also quizzed and detained for bringing two pressure cookers from Saudi Arabia for his nephew...Obviously, the threat from an 'Ay-Rab’ pressure cooker is much greater than one sold in the U.S. of A...Now that carrying everyday items is a sign of being a potential suspect, especially if one has too much melanin (even though the Tsarnaev brothers looked more Caucasian than anything else), I have some advice for brown people and in particular Muslims in America...
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Barack Obama's Shameful Crusade 'Against' Terrorism (By Dr. Sylvie Laurent*) - 19-may-2013
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May 17, 2013 - ...President Barack Obama bears a historic responsibility for the perpetuation of this state of lawlessness. He talks about closing Guantanamo - an old promise of his - while forgetting rather quickly that he is the one who signed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2005 [reauthorized in 2013], which to this day forbids the funding of prisoner transfers on American soil, and therefore, it is in his power to have the 86 exonerated prisoners at Guantanamo released or extradited. Far from being in line with his commitments and the honorable intentions he has declared, by putting Shakur on the list of "main terrorist threats to the country," his administration is participating in the malevolent phenomenon, part of which is to identify people of color as terrorists. The administration is also making its contribution to the lethal crusade against terror, now being fought in Obama's name...
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Free Gaza
Standing Against Oppression in Palestine (by ISMAIL PATEL) - 19-may-2013
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May 17, 2013- Three years ago, I left Britain and flew to Turkey with the intention of joining the Freedom Flotilla bound for the shores of Gaza. Our intention was to break the illegal and immoral siege that was slowly draining the life from the densely populated land. I boarded the Mavi Marmara to take hope to the people of Gaza. What ensued was one of the toughest and most heartbreaking experiences of my life. Over 500 of us were on board the ship, and nine were dead before the end of our journey, having been shot and killed with a total of 30 bullets.My faith means I believe that they were all martyrs, who were killed while attempting to stand up against oppression...
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How Qatar seized control of the Syrian revolution (By Roula Khalaf and Abigail Fielding-Smith) - 19-may-2013
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May 17, 2013 - ...In the shell-blasted areas of rebel-held Syria, few appear to be aware of the vast sums that Qatar has contributed – estimated by rebel and diplomatic sources to be about $1bn, but put by people close to the Qatar government at as much as $3bn. However, a perception is taking root among growing numbers of Syrians that Qatar is using its financial muscle to develop networks of loyalty among rebels and set the stage for influence in a post-Assad era. "Qatar has a lot of money and buys everything with money, and it can put its fingerprints on it," says a rebel officer from the northern province of Idlib interviewed by the FT. However, for Qatar, Syria is also the culmination of an opportunistic foreign policy which saw Doha become the unlikely backer of other Arab revolts in north Africa – and a friend of those who emerge as winners, in most cases Islamists. Qatar has supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Tunisia’s Islamist al-Nahda party, which won the first elections after the popular revolts.... In Syria the Qataris worked through members of the exiled Muslim Brotherhood to identify rebel factions that should be supported. For example, she says, that is how they linked up with the Farouq brigades, one of the largest and more mainstream factions...
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continua / continued
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