tagged w/ International News
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The legacy behind Liddonfield Housing Project has gone international. Apparently, Japan has taken an interest in the demolished housing project's former tenants. A Japanese website has featured a number of videos by Len Knee (L.A. Ives), a former Liddonfield resident. So, what does it all mean? Perhaps Japan is beginning to look at public housing as a means to shelter those made homeless by the earthquakes and tsunamis that have decimated its urban areas.The legacy behind Liddonfield Housing Project has gone international. Apparently,... more
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The man accused of the killing spree in Norway was deeply influenced by a small group of American bloggers and writers who have warned for years about the threat from Islam, lacing his 1,500-page manifesto with quotations from them, as well as copying multiple passages from the tract of the Unabomber.
In the document he posted online, Anders Behring Breivik, who is accused of bombing government buildings and killing scores of young people at a Labor Party camp, showed that he had closely followed the acrimonious American debate over Islam.
His manifesto, which denounced Norwegian politicians as failing to defend the country from Islamic influence, quoted Robert Spencer, who operates the Jihad Watch Web site, 64 times, and cited other Western writers who shared his view that Muslim immigrants pose a grave danger to Western culture.
More broadly, the mass killings in Norway, with their echo of the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City by an antigovernment militant, have focused new attention around the world on the subculture of anti-Muslim bloggers and right-wing activists and renewed a debate over the focus of counterterrorism efforts.
In the United States, critics have asserted that the intense spotlight on the threat from Islamic militants has unfairly vilified Muslim Americans while dangerously playing down the threat of attacks from other domestic radicals. The author of a 2009 Department of Homeland Security report on right-wing extremism withdrawn by the department after criticism from conservatives repeated on Sunday his claim that the department had tilted too heavily toward the threat from Islamic militants.
The revelations about Mr. Breivik’s American influences exploded on the blogs over the weekend, putting Mr. Spencer and other self-described “counterjihad” activists on the defensive, as their critics suggested that their portrayal of Islam as a threat to the West indirectly fostered the crimes in Norway.
(much more at link)The man accused of the killing spree in Norway was deeply influenced by a small group... more
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Inmates in a third of California's prisons are conducting a hunger strike in protest of solitary confinement policy. Recent reports show that many inmates, who are in their third week of the strike, have shown dramatic weight loss and are collapsing from starvation, reports the Los Angeles Times.
The protesting inmates, who are most active at Pelican Bay State Prison, Corcoran State Prison, and the California Correctional Institute at Tehachapi, have been refusing meals since July 1, according to KPCC radio. Many of the protesters are in solitary confinement, otherwise known as security housing units (SHU).
They have five core demands (via Prisons.org):
1. "Eliminate group punishments" and instead enforce individual accountability.
2. Abolish debriefing policies, which dictate that inmates in SHU can only be released into the regular prison population if they provide information on gang activity.
3. Make prisons comply with the recommendations of the US Commission on Safety and Abuse in Prisons (2006) to end longterm solitary confinement.
4. "Provide adequate food" and sanitary conditions in solitary confinement.
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5. Have the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation expand and provide education programs and other privileges for SHU inmates.
Estimates about the number of striking prisoners vary. The LA Times places the number of protesters at about 400, while the New York Times reports that about 2,000 California inmates are under medical watch. The Huffington Post reports that nearly 1,500 prisoners are involved. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation told SolitaryWatch.com that at least 6,600 inmates have refused meals.
Full story HERE
http://www.waneenterprises.com/news/732Inmates in a third of California's prisons are conducting a hunger strike in... more
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More than 6,000 people have begun a march to remember the victims of the Srebrenica massacre during the Bosnian war.
They set off from Nezuk on the route used by thousands of Bosnian Muslim men women and children to flee the UN safe haven after it was overrun by Bosnian Serb troops in July 1995.
Those troops, led by the recently arrested Ratko Mladic, went on to slaughter 8,000 men and boys in the worst massacre in Europe since World War II.
The marchers will arrive in Srebrenica on Monday for a ceremony to mark the 16th anniversary.
Vehid Dedic escaped the killing by walking for seven days. He said: “We who survived in 1995 have to be grateful to these people, our friends and those from around the world who have come to pay their respects to the victims.”
More/video at the linkMore than 6,000 people have begun a march to remember the victims of the Srebrenica... more
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WikiLeaks cables have revealed that Catholic bishops played a key role in 2002's abortive military coup in Venezuela
In 1997 Eamon Duffy, president of Magdalene College, Cambridge, brought out the best one-volume history of popes that has ever been written. He called it Saints & Sinners.
In the light of the latest news from Venezuela I would respectfully urge him to set about writing a companion volume about the leaders of the church in Latin America. I suggest that he calls it Saints, Traitors & Sinners.
The church in that region has of course produced some remarkable saints – some of them unrecognised in the upper reaches of the Vatican. Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador; the six Jesuits, their housekeeper and her daughter slain by the western-supported Salvadorean army on the campus of the Central American University; the prelates and clergy killed by the repulsive military regime in Argentina and Cardinal Raúl Silva, archbishop of Santiago de Chile at the time of Pinochet's putsch, were and are among the brightest stars in the church's firmament.
Yet the clergy had – and still has – its villains.
Among the latest revelations to emerge from WikiLeaks is that, in 2002, as plotters in Venezuela's capital Caracas were liaising with the US authorities about the conspiracy to topple President Hugo Chávez, the leaders of the Catholic church in that country were defying the instruction of Pope John Paul II to desist from having anything to do with the coup d'état. Instead they threw their lot in with Pedro Carmona, the extremist rightwing businessman, who took office for less than 48 hours during a brief military coup in April 2002.
The cables reveal that Cardinal Antonio Ignacio Velasco, the Salesian archbishop of Caracas, was on hand to sign papers purporting to legitimise the ridiculous Carmona as he dismissed the congress and the judges, and briefly sent Venezuelan politics back into the dark ages. Happily, the genuine popularity of the legitimate head of state was such that the Carmona gang and their military accomplices were routed and Chávez was restored to power.
In doing what he did, Velasco, who died in 2003, and the majority of his fellow bishops, betrayed not just the papacy but their compatriots at the instance of a foreign power – in this case, the United States. This added to the prelates' marginalisation in Venezuelan life by the majority who, unsurprisingly, see them as firm upholders of the establishment in a major oil-producing country, where half of the population live below the poverty line.
Velasco and his successors are remembered now as part of the camarilla that opposed the reform programme of the Chávez government, which, in the 12 years it has been in power, raised a quarter of the country's population out of poverty.
The US government's – not to mention the western media's – condemnation of Chávez has, for years, done much to blank out the successes of a government which is still not just legitimate but popular. Few in the west realise that extreme poverty has been cut drastically and unemployment has been halved so that no more than 7% of the population is out of work.
On 19 November 2002, several months after Velasco's catastrophic mistake, the US envoy to the Vatican, James Nicholson, reported to his masters in Washington that the Holy See was alarmed at the outlook for further civil violence in the coming months. "The pope himself has insistently asked the Venezuelan bishops to cool their political activism and instead encourage dialogue," he said.
But by that time it was too late. Despite the fact that a mass was reported to have been offered in Caracas on Wednesday for Chávez as he recovers from his emergency operation in Havana, leaders of Venezuela's Catholics are seen to be on the wrong side, the side of the rich. But wasn't there something in the gospels about rich people, camels and the eyes of needles?WikiLeaks cables have revealed that Catholic bishops played a key role in 2002's... more
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.Several attackers believed to be wearing suicide vests stormed a luxury hotel in the Afghan capital, Kabul, late Tuesday and early reports indicate that 10 people have been killed.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack on the Intercontinental Hotel. Spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the group was targeting foreign guests and that heavy casualties have been inflicted. However, the Taliban often exaggerates the number of casualties in attacks against Western and Afghan government targets.
Police said a wedding party was under way when the attack occurred. They said at least one suicide bomber blew himself up inside the hotel. However, witnesses reported at least three loud explosions and gunfire inside and outside the hotel.
Police blocked off streets leading to the hotel, situated on a hill overlooking the Afghan capital and said the entire area was in darkness.
Violence has flared across Afghanistan since the Taliban announced its spring offensive and the United States is set to start withdrawing troops from Afghanistan in the coming weeks.
In other violence Tuesday, NATO said three of its service members died in separate insurgent and bomb attacks in southern Afghanistan.
Also in the south, authorities said a roadside bomb killed two women and wounded a child in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province..Several attackers believed to be wearing suicide vests stormed a luxury hotel in the... more
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The mayor of Naples on Thursday ordered armed guards to escort garbage trucks around his city, warning that organised crime rings were fomenting a grave waste crisis that is putting residents at risk.
"The environmental and sanitary situation is serious. There is a real risk for the health of citizens. The situation is made more difficult because the garbage is being set on fire," Luigi de Magistris told reporters.
"We will ask the police to provide an armed guard for the trucks," he said after signing an order that will enforce the new measure for 30 days.
Naples is the stronghold of the Camorra -- a powerful international crime syndicate with a wide range of activities including drug trafficking, as well as major interests in construction, import-export and waste disposal.
De Magistris said the Camorra was against him because he wanted an "environmental revolution" that would enforce legislation on recycling garbage and therefore take a chunk of traditional revenues away from the Camorra.
The newly-elected leftist mayor of the southern Italian city also accused Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his government of failing to help.
"Berlusconi has shown with his actions that he doesn't give a damn about Naples. He has washed his hands of it like Pontius Pilate," he said.
De Magistris won a local election last month against a candidate from Berlusconi's ruling People of Freedom party, which also lost control of Milan.
Italian President Giorgio Napolitano also stepped into the debate over the garbage crisis in Naples, plagued for years by problems with its waste disposal system that have been aggravated by the stranglehold of the mafia.
"An intervention is absolutely indispensable and urgent due to the worsening of the acute and alarming waste emergency in Naples," Napolitano told Il Mattino, the local newspaper in Naples, calling on Berlusconi to take action.
More at the link.The mayor of Naples on Thursday ordered armed guards to escort garbage trucks around... more
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Britain faces no serious threat, yet keeps waging war. While big defence exists, glory-hungry politicians will use it.
Why do we still go to war? We seem unable to stop. We find any excuse for this post-imperial fidget and yet we keep getting trapped. Germans do not do it, or Spanish or Swedes. Britain's borders and British people have not been under serious threat for a generation. Yet time and again our leaders crave battle. Why?
Last week we got a glimpse of an answer and it was not nice. The outgoing US defence secretary, Robert Gates, berated Europe's "failure of political will" in not maintaining defence spending. He said Nato had declined into a "two-tier alliance" between those willing to wage war and those "who specialise in 'soft' humanitarian, development, peacekeeping and talking tasks". Peace, he implied, is for wimps. Real men buy bombs, and drop them.
(click on the link for the full article)Britain faces no serious threat, yet keeps waging war. While big defence exists,... more
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Starvation! Working or not-inflation-recession... calls for a sacred moment with Jesus Christ. Exclusive gospel channel: http://tinyurl.com/exclusive-gospel-channelStarvation! Working or not-inflation-recession... calls for a sacred moment with Jesus... more
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Hours after the African Union announced the broad contours of the agreement between North and South Sudan signed in Addis Ababa last week, the National Congress Party said the position paper was merely a proposal. The AU contributed to brokering peace in Sudan, now its staying power is being tested.
AU managed to have the political parties sign a code of conduct ahead of the elections but stood by hopelessly as some elements of the code were violated. Moreover, it stood by, continuing to negotiate future north-south arrangements, as the north invaded and occupied Abyei.
The Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the creation of porous borders, and possibly with security arrangements as per the deal, could prove rare achievements for the AU.
Overall, the north and south don’t have much of a choice but to collaborate. The south supplies the oil, the north refines it. The south depends on the north for its major imports and the north relies on the south for its markets, making it necessary for the two to establish a free trade zone.
Yet, whether the north and south come to these terms would assume that the leadership is working in the interests of their people. The invasion by the northern forces of Abyei a trade embargo on the south that has seen gas prices increase three times in some areas and at least two times in others, and continued support to militias cast fresh doubts on the future relations of the two states.
Despite endless pledges to coexist with the south, the north has occasionally turned back on its word and trust between the two sides is at an all time low.
Bashir, again, said that the north would peacefully co-exist with the south. Yet, he not only dismissed the concept of a new Sudan, the central point of the CPA, but also made this a pre-condition for peaceful coexistence.
cont.Hours after the African Union announced the broad contours of the agreement between... more
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In what could be considered the most modern form of prisoner torture know, prisoners in a labor camp in northeastern China have allegedly been forced to play MMORPG's like World of Warcraft in an elaborate scheme said to net prison bosses approximately $800 to $900 per day.
A former prisoner who identified himself as "Liu Dali" told the Guardian that guards forced prisoners to work 12-hour shifts on a procedure commonly referred to as "gold mining." The process essentially requires long hours of playing the game to build up credits, which are then in turn sold for real money.
Prisoners did not see any of the money they made for their bosses, he told the publication.
(read all about it at link)In what could be considered the most modern form of prisoner torture know, prisoners... more
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Serbian President Boris Tadic has announced the arrest of longtime war-crimes fugitive Ratko Mladic, the former commander of Bosnian Serb forces during the war that took place after Yugoslavia's breakup.
President Tadic said Mladic was arrested on Serbian soil and that the process of handing him over to the U.N. war crimes tribunal is under way.
(more at link)Serbian President Boris Tadic has announced the arrest of longtime war-crimes fugitive... more
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Kuniko Tanioko: Japan must tell world how it dealt with the nuclear runoff into the ocean
Daphne Wysham is a Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and founder and host of Earthbeat, now airing on 61 public radio stations in the US and Canada.
Kuniko Tanioka is a Japanese politician of the Democratic Party of Japan, a member of the House of Councillors in the Diet (national legislature). A native of Osaka Prefecture, she graduated from the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada and received a Ph.D in design. She was elected to the House of Councillors for the first time in 2007.Kuniko Tanioko: Japan must tell world how it dealt with the nuclear runoff into the... more
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HAVANA, Cuba, April 18: By Miguel Iturria Savón - Two extraordinary and conflicting events pepper the history of Cuba in the second half of the twentieth century. The first occurred between 17 and 19 April 1961 in the Bay of Pigs, in the south of the island. The second, from April 22 to the 16th of September between the northern port of Mariel and Florida. They were both led by Cubans, but both the 1961 invasion brigade and the mass exodus of 1980, dot the island's bilateral relations with the United States - the refuge used by many in Cuban history as a supply center for our independence of the nineteenth century, and by opponents of the dictatorships of Geraldo Machado, Fulgencio Batista and Castro in the twentieth.
Much has been written about these events to the north and south of Florida. Hundreds of articles, interviews, testimonies, books, documentaries and other media support the communist government's version, the victors of the battle at Playa Giron over the brigade of compatriot exiles trained abroad. The version of the vanquished was, of course, suffocated by the revolutionary fetishism, and is hardly known.
Official propaganda reiterates that Giron (as it is known in Cuba), "was the first defeat of imperialism in Latin America ", which is a distortion, because although the Cuban expedition had the support of the United States government, no American troops took part in the naval operation. The fighters of Brigade 2506, like the guerrillas they were trying to link up with in the Escambray mountains, were fighting against the dictatorship that had taken control of the island after the revolutionary chaos.
The Cubans were less free after the Bay of Pigs. A day earlier, on April 16, 1961 - Fidel Castro declared the socialist character of the revolution. The island was subsequently occupied by thousands of Russian soldiers whose bases were maintained until the mid-eighties. The rest of the story goes through half a century of dictatorship, populist clamor, corruption and the legacy of silence.
The flip side to this was the mass exodus from Mariel and Florida, a popular referendum against authoritarianism. Twenty years of repression, rhetorical contortions, shortages filled with boredom and disappointment to thousands of youths who dreamed of living without instructions.
After the bus that forced the gates of the Embassy of Peru in La Habana, into the embassy entered the flood of the unhappy. To withdraw security to the embassy, the government created the chaos and encouraged the arrival of American vessels to pick up relatives and other "scum." In less than five months left 125,000 people fled to the United States.
Faced with this surge, the leader ordered rallies of repudiation, the throwing of eggs and stones against dissidents, and the introduction of more than three thousand madmen and criminals into the boats of hope in an attempt to destroy the reputation of those who left. Three decades later, the horror and defamation against those who choose another destination remains an official practice.
Accustomed to reliving the past - evoking attacks, revolutionary symbols and involving third parties in the national struggle, the Cuban regime celebrated its victory with another celebration of the Bay of Pigs and the socialist character of the revolution, while its strategists shuffle policies to prevent another mass exodus like the one that created the sea-bridge between Mariel and Florida in the spring of 1980; where bridging the gap between Mariel and Florida represented a leap to freedom.HAVANA, Cuba, April 18: By Miguel Iturria Savón - Two extraordinary and... more
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Allan Emrys Blakeney, former Premier and Minister of Health lost a battle with liver cancer, he was 85.
www.leaderpost.comAllan Emrys Blakeney, former Premier and Minister of Health lost a battle with liver... more
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A Group of Expatriate Executives and Engineers Furtively Restore Telecommunications for the Libyan Opposition
A team led by a Libyan-American telecom executive has helped rebels hijack Col. Moammar Gadhafi's cellphone network and re-establish their own communications.
The new network, first plotted on an airplane napkin and assembled with the help of oil-rich Arab nations, is giving more than two million Libyans their first connections to each other and the outside world after Col. Gadhafi cut off their telephone and Internet service about a month ago.
That March cutoff had rebels waving flags to communicate on the battlefield. The new cellphone network, opened on April 2, has become the opposition's main tool for communicating from the front lines in the east and up the chain of command to rebel brass hundreds of miles away.
(read the rest at link)A Group of Expatriate Executives and Engineers Furtively Restore Telecommunications... more
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The Egyptian public prosecutor has issued an order to summon Hosni Mubarak, the former president of Egypt, and his two sons, Alaa and Gamal, for questioning over allegations of corruption. Just hours earlier Mubarak had made his first public statement since his dramatic departure from office. He denied being involved in corruption and denied having financial assets in foreign countries. For his part the public prosecutor said Mubarak's speech will not have any impact on the legal measures against him and his family. All this follows a crackdown on protestors in Tahrir Square on Friday and Saturday, in which two people were killed and 70 injured. So, would a trial appease those worried about a counter revolution in Egypt? Or might it further strain relations between the army and the people?The Egyptian public prosecutor has issued an order to summon Hosni Mubarak, the former... more
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Recently returned from Benghazi, Hafiz reports on rebel fighters, supporters and early stages of the Libyan uprising.
Jihan Hafiz reported for The Real News Network while in Libya in February and March 2011.Recently returned from Benghazi, Hafiz reports on rebel fighters, supporters and early... more
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Recently returned from Bengazi, Hafiz reports on rebel fighters, supporters and early stages of the Libyan uprising.Recently returned from Bengazi, Hafiz reports on rebel fighters, supporters and early... more
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Disturbing sense of Déjà Vu continues to permeate the information coming in about Japan’s Fukushima plant nuclear disaster. In spite of disturbing revelations, we’re being told not to worry. On March 20, 2011, Energy Secretary Steven Chu made the rounds on American talk shows, stating that people in the U.S. are “in no danger” and as far as Japan is concerned, “we'll see what comes.” Being lulled into a false sense of security usually results in a rude awakening. The truth may not be comforting, but is definitely past due.
(much more at link)Disturbing sense of Déjà Vu continues to permeate the information coming... more
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