President Obama issued an executive order Friday evening that imposes immediate sanctions on Libyan ruler Muammar al Qaddafi, his sons and his accomplices in the slaughter of civilians. In a letter accompanying the order, Obama declared a national emergency over the situation.
"I have determined that the actions of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, his government, and close associates, including extreme measures against the people of Libya, constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.
It is quite startling to realise that a special room had been set up to receive the dead of the July 7th bombings in a temporary morgue built on army land, the contract for which (see [1] below) arrived on the contractor’s desk on July 6th, the day before the massacres.
All the bodies of the dead were taken and cryogenically stored here.
Not until the Inquest, five years later, did startled lawyers acting on behalf of the victim-families get to hear, that NO POST MORTEMS had been performed on the dead.
Let us repeat this astonishing statement, the better to realise our own astounded bafflement:
NO POST MORTEMS HAD BEEN PERFORMED ON THE DEAD.
Seventeen years ago this past Friday, 30 Muslim worshippers were slaughtered while at prayer. 270 were severely injured. This took place in one of the holiest sites in Palestine, a site revered by both Jews and Muslims. It is the resting place of our common Father Abraham and his family. The massacre was carried out by a crazed Jewish settler from Brooklyn.
The site itself is a unique structure as it serves both as a mosque and a synagogue. When one enters, it is difficult not to feel the thousands of years of common history that these two peoples share. Today, it is difficult not to feel the lingering hatred in the area as a result of the zionist occupation and harassment.
Thank you all so much for visiting! If you are here to learn how help feed the protesters in Madison, here's how you can do that:
Call us at 608-257-9248, then press 1. As we have just three phone lines it may take a while to get through, and we apologize in advance for that.
For online ordering we have partnered with both badgerbites.com and campusfood.com to process our online orders. If you would like to order online, please put 115 State Street as the delivery address, and add in the notes that you would like to help feed the protesters.
"Like the U.N. and Europe, the U.S. sees the world as two spheres---The Gentile sphere where all divine and international laws apply and the Jewish/Israeli Sphere where no such laws, ethics, or morality apply; thereby reinforcing Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s statement that the basic function of a goy, a derogatory word for a gentile, is to serve Jews."
“Israel may have the RIGHT to put others on Trial, but Certainly NO ONE has the Right to put the Jewish People and the State of Israel on Trial.”
-- Ariel Sharon, Quoted by BBC, March 25, 2001
Secretary of state heads to Geneva to consult with allies on next step to end crisis in country; Italian FM says friendship treaty with Libya is canceled and the end of Gaddafi's rule is "inevitable."
It gets worse by the day!
The body count is climbing, as expected, but it's the survivors that are the real worry. The amount of shock experienced by the victims is beginning to really show now, as we go into day 5 after the disaster. The whole city rests on a pile of wet sand which sinks each time there is anoither tremor. There are continuing after shocks - one every few minutes, some greater than others - which have reduced morale to a very low ebb. No one is sleeping. Many have not had washing facilities for the past 5 days and water is really difficult to obtain. It's not a lack of supply, but the difficulty in reaching it with smashed roads and liquifaction preventing car movment.
Most Americans think that the political upheaval spreading throughout the Arab world may wind up drawing the United States into a new large-scale war, a Rasmussen Reports poll found. The poll also found most Americans favor cutting off aid to Arab countries.
A new national telephone survey found that 58% of American adults believe the unrest in the Middle East will lead to a major war involving the US, with 26% saying it is "very likely.
Seventy-seven percent of Americans are "concerned that radical Islamic terrorists may try to exploit the unrest in these countries to further their violent aims,"
Editor's Note: Sorry the dictator that we supported for two decades didn't work out. We're happy to help replace him, just keep your oil flowing to our corporations.
AFP WASHINGTON (AFP) - The United States is prepared to offer "any kind of assistance" to Libyans seeking to overthrow the regime of strongman Moamer Kadhafi, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Sunday...
Angela Merkel is carefully observing what can only be classified as a peaceful revolution in Ireland, where a stunning amount, over 70% by some estimates, of voters turned out to punish the ruling Fianna Fail party for its betrayal of the Irish people and for the latest (and what some say last) broad banker bailout.
There is no opportunity missed to heap praise on puppet Iraqi repression forces. (Upon learning that some 20 protesters were killed, this is what a US commander has said: "Col. Barry A. Johnson, a spokesman for the United States military, said Iraq’s security forces appeared to respond well to the volatile, sometimes violent, crowds. "The Iraqi forces’ response appeared professional and restrained," he said in an e-mail.").
Well, at least he didn't suggest that the Iraqi victims shot themselves in order to make Americans look bad, following the logic of the Grand High Poobah of the Militarist Lodge, David Petraeus, with his recent "suggestions" that the grubby little darkies in Afghanistan were burning their own children as a PR stunt.
Qalqilya is an acute case which crystallizes the terrible problems faced by people across the West Bank: Israeli control of space and freedom of movement, the curtailing of essential resources, high graduate unemployment, massive inequalities between settlers and Palestinians, and the human impact of living under military occupation.
The issue of freedom for Palestine remains at the centre of Middle East politics - and it is inextricably linked to the movements of popular resistance and revolution currently shaking global politics.
A global banking cartel has looted nation after nation, the world over, the United States is no exception. They’ve looted trillions from the US public and now they are trying to cut the throat of the public unions. While in the process of attacking private-sector workers and small businesses throughout the country, they are also cracking down on the last layer of worker protections within the public-sector.
The same economic central planners that have systematically exploited workers in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Australia and Asia, have exploited American workers as well. One-tenth of one percent of the population got luxurious life boats, while 99.9% of us are being left behind to drown in a sea of debt and social upheaval.
As the wave of popular uprisings has spread across the Arab world, a flurry of articles have appeared suggesting Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez could be the next “dictator” to be overthrown. Such arguments follow a pattern in the corporate media of slandering the Chavez government and the revolutionary process it leads. They aim to conceal the real threat that haunts imperialism: that the Arab world may follow the example of Venezuela and other countries in Latin America — and break away from Western hegemony.
The debt and inflation will become more terse as we struggle forward. Government knows it has to cut Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, screwing the participants and better enabling government to control and reduce these benefits. Allowing government to renege over and over again does not instill confidence in its citizens. There are mammoth cuts coming, but the military industrial complex will experience few. This is how the elitists keep their empire by threat of force. Just look around you and look at the Patriot Act and Homeland Security or the new Gestapo the FBI. Yes readers, you already live in a police state.
Megrahi is the only man ever to have been convicted over the bombing, which killed all 259 passengers and crew on board the New York-bound Boeing 747 and 11 people in Lockerbie in December 1998.
Rallies were held across the country Saturday to support thousands of protesters holding steady at the Wisconsin Capitol in their fight against Republican-backed legislation aimed at weakening unions.
"I want to thank you for coming out here today to exercise those pesky First Amendment rights," actor Bradley Whitford, who starred in television's "The West Wing," told his hometown crowd. "This governor has to understand Wisconsin is a stubborn constituency. We fish through ice!"
As the new models go into development, let’s hope Cheetah never develops a taste for human flesh and that Atlas doesn’t have any hard feelings about its predecessor being a poison-gas guinea pig for the Army.
A news release from the Public Policy Forum and Sustainable Prosperity last Wednesday began, “A poll released today shows that Canadians believe that climate change is happening and would be willing to pay for government policies that reverse or slow the damage.” They continued, “Belief in climate change among Canadians substantially outpaces belief in this phenomenon among residents of the United States.”
But that wasn’t really what the survey showed — respondents were actually asked about somewhat different topics.
It may be small but it packs a hefty punch, containing an ultra low-power microprocessor, a pressure sensor, memory, a thin film battery, a solar cell and a wireless radio with an antenna that can transmit data to an external reader device.
Iran has awarded contracts worth $2.6 billion to a company controlled by the Revolutionary Guards, the semi-official Mehr news agency said on Saturday, showing the continuing rise of the elite military force.
Khatam al-Anbia will build two pipelines totaling 1,100 km long to carry oil from the southeastern Khuzestan province to a refinery in Rey, south of the capital Tehran, under a contract with a state oil company worth $1.3 billion, Mehr said.
Khatam al-Anbia will sign another $1.3 billion contract with the National Iranian Gas Co. soon to build a segment of pipeline to northwestern Iran that Tehran hopes could eventually take Iranian gas to markets in Western Europe, Mehr said.
In an IAEA report issued on Friday, the agency reaffirmed that Iran’s nuclear program has never been diverted to nuclear weapons production, the Press TV correspondent in Vienna reported. But the report still says Tehran must halt its uranium enrichment activities, as demanded by four United Nations Security Council resolutions. Iran’s ambassador to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, stated that the demand is politically motivated, saying, “When all nuclear activities are accounted for and there is no diversion to military purposes… then what is the justification for referring to an old obsolete request of suspension.”
Reporting from Madison, Wis. —
Nearly two weeks into a political standoff, tens of thousands rallied in Madison and in dozens of cities around the nation to oppose a bill that would severely limit collective bargaining rights for most Wisconsin public employees.
Joel DeSpain, spokesman for the Madison Police Department, said the rally — in steadily falling snow — drew between 70,000 and 100,000 and may have been the largest protest in Madison since the Vietnam War.
A 58-year-old Wal-Mart employee who said he "couldn't take it anymore" lit himself on fire in a parking lot near the Bloomingdale store where he worked late Thursday night and was later pronounced dead at a hospital, authorities said this morning.
In an interview, his son said his father went to work last night with nothing seeming out of the ordinary. "This had nothing to do with the economy. I want to make that clear," he said, adding that the family may never know the reason for the public suicide.
It is too early to chart the future course of events with confidence, but it seems unlikely that these liberated peoples will look to Washington and New York as their political or economic model.
The great question is whether America will take its diminished status gracefully, or whether it will lash out, as empires in trouble are historically prone to do.
Wisconsin Police Have Joined Protest Inside State Capitol
The appeal, which came in the form of a letter signed by 40 policy analysts, including more than a dozen former senior officials who served under President George W. Bush, was organised and released by the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), a two-year-old neo-conservative group that is widely seen as the successor to the more-famous – or infamous – Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
Riding the wave of unrest in the Arab world, the PA called for a carefully controlled ‘day of rage’ throughout the West Bank against the United States for their recent veto of an internationally accepted resolution declaring (once again) that Israeli settlement activity is illegal. While in Ramallah the PA sponsored demonstration was weak with almost no one showing up, in Hebron one thousand people, including Israeli peace activists, took to the streets.
The European Space Agency's (ESA) Mars Express has snapped an image of a modest ice lake on the Red Planet. The frozen patch of water ice is tucked away in an unnamed impact crater. The feature is located on Vastitas Borealis, a broad plain that covers much of the far northern latitudes.
As General Smedley Butler told the jingoistic American population, to no avail, "war is a racket." As long as the American population remains proud that their relatives serve as cannon fodder for the military/security complex, war will remain a racket.
A group of Qatari activists has created a page on the social networking website Facebook demanding the ouster of Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani.
More than 18,000 people have already joined the page on Facebook, AFP reported on Saturday.
Under the title "Freedom Revolution, March 16, Qatar," the page calls on the "Qatari nation to hit the streets to demand change." The activists are demanding that Qatar cut off relations with Israel, with which it maintains informal ties, and the United States, which has a military base in the Persian Gulf state.
Iraqi security forces detained hundreds of people, including prominent journalists, artists and intellectuals, witnesses said Saturday, a day after nationwide demonstrations brought tens of thousands of Iraqis into the streets and ended with soldiers shooting into crowds.
Four journalists who had been released described being rounded up well after they had left a protest at Baghdad's Tahrir Square. They said they were handcuffed, blindfolded, beaten and threatened with execution by soldiers from an army intelligence unit.
AFP TEHRAN (AFP) - A trip to the Middle East by the top US military officer Mike Mullen shows the "deep worry" of Washington when it comes to the fate of its forces in the region, the top Iranian general said Sunday...
Poor neighborhoods of the Libyan capital Tripoli openly defied Muammar Gaddafi on Saturday as his grip on power after 41 years of rule looked increasingly tenuous in the face of nationwide revolt. Security forces had abandoned the working-class Tajoura district after five days of anti-government demonstrations, residents told foreign correspondents who visited the area.
Unrest in the Middle East has now apparently reached the Persian Gulf kingdom of Oman where two people are reported to have died following clashes between state security officers and anti-government protesters. Another ten people were wounded by police firing rubber bullets and tear gas, according to reports.
About 4,600 Chinese had left Libya by Thursday in China's largest-ever evacuation, the rescue of about 30,000 nationals stuck in the riot-torn north African state.
Over 100,000 people in Madison, Wisconsin were joined by thousands of other Americans around the country in protest of Gov. Scott Walker’s attempt to strip collective bargaining rights from the state’s unionized workers, but you would not have known any of this if you watched cable news on Saturday as the coverage of the protests ranged from disappointing (MSNBC) to scant (CNN) to non-existent (Fox News).
Pranked by a gonzo journalist pretending to be conservative billionaire David Koch, Walker said on the 20-minute call that his administration considered planting "troublemakers" in the crowd of demonstrators opposing his budget, which curtails the collective bargaining rights of public employees.
Tens of thousands protested in cities throughout Iraq yesterday against the economic oppression and corrupt officials imposed by the US occupation regime, as well as the US occupation itself.
Complaining of joblessness, worsening electricity outages, food shortages, and rising food prices, they denounced or demanded the resignation of several national and local officials. Even though Iraq has the world’s second-largest oil reserves, social conditions are atrocious. The official unemployment rate is over 15 percent (in reality much higher), large parts of Iraq have only a few hours of electricity a day, and the country is still occupied by 47,000 US troops—with Iraq’s oil fields now largely in the hands of Western energy firms.
Hundreds of armed anti-government forces backed by rebel troops who control the city closest to the capital Tripoli prepared Sunday to repel an expected offensive by forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi surrounding Zawiya.
An Associated Press reporter who reached Zawiya, 30 miles (50 kilometers) west of Tripoli, confirmed the anti-government rebels are in control of the center of the city of 200,000. They have army tanks and anti-aircraft guns mounted on pickup trucks deployed. But on the outskirts, they are surrounded by pro-Gaddafi forces, also backed by tanks and anti-aircraft guns.
On Friday, massive Arab Revolutionary demonstrations were held throughout the Middle East, amid Gaddafi's brutal mercenary militia killing more protesters in Libya.
Press TV interviewed International Lawyer, Franklin Lamb from Beirut regarding the uprisings in the Middle East.
Israeli warplanes bombed half a dozen targets in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, wounding a seven-month-old girl and a Palestinian man, medics in the coastal territory said.
An early morning gun and bomb attack has shut down Iraq's biggest oil refinery, Baiji, with at least two employees killed.
The prime minister of Tunisia has stepped down from the interim government, according to the country's official news agency.
Prime Minister Mohamed Ghannouchi's resignation Sunday came a day after three people were killed during protests in the capital, Tunis.
"I am resigning today because I am not willing to be a person that takes decisions that could cause casualties," he told reporters Sunday.
Earth is currently in a long-term warming trend. After a regional nuclear war, though, average global temperatures would drop by 2.25 degrees F (1.25 degrees C) for two to three years afterward, the models suggest.
Two weeks before Christmas, Curtis came home and found a foreclosure notice taped to his door. It said his home would soon be put up for auction -- even though he had never missed a mortgage payment.
The foreclosure process on the Curtis home began when Curtis and his wife applied for a loan modification in March. Curtis had been out of full-time work for nine months and was trying to stay current on all of his bills.
The miscommunication is costing homeowners all over the country a lot of time and money -- and in some cases even their homes. Bank of America now faces consumer class-action suits in several states for persistent failure to modify loans.
ens of thousands of anti-government protesters are streaming through Bahrain's diplomatic area and other neighborhoods as demonstrations against the kingdom's rulers show no signs of easing.
At least three processions Sunday paralyzed parts of the capital Manama.
My name is Michael Rivero and I have been asked to say just a few words, and I promise to try my best. I am a talk radio host for the Republic Broadcasting Network and webmaster of what really happened dot com, which was honored recently by being added to the Southern Poverty Law Center list of patriot website you should never ever ever ever look at or your nose will drop off. We are proud, we are happy, and we are thrilled! This last week I have been flooded with emails screaming about teachers and unions, but this debate is far larger than that. This is not about teachers or unions, but about all Americans facing a government that wants to pay for Wall Street's fraudulent mortgage backed securities by "sharing the sacrifice" i.e. dumping the losses on the public, almost $12.3 trillion according to PBS and FCIC report.
The constant message is "the people must make do with less so that Wall Street may have more." But Wall Street is trying to trick the public into thinking that the teachers are the bad guys, when the teachers had nothing to so with the financial ruin of the nation. It's just classic divide and conquer; turn the public against each other to save the rich, and if the teachers lose, then it will be the police, then the firefighters, then the repair men, then the trash pickup, then the road layers, then you, then me. This, we are told will save the state budgets because if we all make less money, the state collects less taxes. (Wait a moment, how is that supposed to work?)
So what is really going on? What is going on is that we are in the middle of the biggest financial swindle since the Great South Seas Company fraud collapsed in 1721. Starting after Congress repealed the Glass Steagal act in 1999, Wall Street went on a gambling binge with a new "product" called the mortgage backed security or the collateralized debt obligation. They were so popular that in order to meet demand, failed mortgages were bundled into the investments, Congress (themselves invested in those Wall Street companies) lured marginal homebuyers in with an $8000 first time homebuyer credit, and in some cases such as Bear Sterns, The same mortgages were pledged over and over again into multiple investment packages. Fraud was rampant, but as long as the money kept pouring in, nobody wanted to rock the boat. Even Alan Greenspan is on video admittin gthat fraud and criminaloity pervade the American ficnancial system. So we better slap those teachers around if we want to save the country!
Then the fraud became exposed, and major foreign banks sued to force Wall Street to buy back all the fraudulent mortgage-backed securities. Even though 90% of Americans were opposed to using tax money to save Wall Street from its own greed and recklessness, Congress, themselves invested in those Wall Street firms, passed TARP and a host of other programs to use YOUR money to buy back those fraudulent mortgage-backed securities, calling them "toxic assets" so the taxpayers did not realize what was going on, or that these assets could never ever produce a profit despite promises to the contrary. To date, $12.3 trillion dollars looted from the American economy, and no end in site as Bernanke cranks up those printing presses again, to shower new fresh money on the banks, which drives the value of the dollars you already worked for and saved downward, which you are seeing today in higher prices at the supermarket and gas stations.
During the congressional hearings into the financial melt-down, Damon Slivers stated, "We can either have a rational resolution to the foreclosure crisis or we can preserve the capital structure of the banks. We can’t do both. Which shall we do?”
What the Federal Government decided to so is that in order to save the banks, private homes needed to be sacrificed to the banks to cover the losses from the forced buy-back of the fraudulent mortgage backed securities. This is wealth confiscation to protect the banks; a larger version of Roosevelt's 1933 gold confiscation, only done in a way to trick Americans into thinking that it is their own fault they are losing their homes. The scam is simple. Starting under Bush and acceleration under Obama,. Tax incentives were given to corporations to reward the transfer of high paying jobs to other countries via "offshoring", an odd thing to do at a time when (like today) the government whines that tax revenues are in decline. But the goal was to take away Americans' ability to pay their mortgages in order to make it easier for banks to take homes to put on their balance sheets, to stay solvent even as trillions of dollars are being paid to buy back the fraudulent mortgage backed securities, code-named the "toxic assets". Just days ago, when Obama announced a token settlement to end "foreclosuregate" the White House official press release admitted the goal was to "ramp up the foreclosure process." That is, to return to allowing banks to confiscate private homes to cover the losses from the swindle, unhampered by issues of legality of process.
So, what happens when teachers, firefighters, police, bricklayers, you and I are forced to accept lower salaries? Why, our homes become fodder for the foreclosure machine. Governor Walker isn't lost lowering the teachers pay; he is helping the banks take their homes. The teachers in Wisconsin are drawing a line in the sand and saying "we will not let you take our jobs so the banks can take our homes to pay for Wall Street crime." They are fighting not only for themselves but for Every American who has been pushed to the limit and beyond. Look at all the homeless and hungry people in America right now. That is your future if we do not unite and support the teachers, because every time Americans surrender a little more of their standard of living, Wall Street gets bolder and bolder, and demands that much more. Our government can spend $12.3 trillion to save the bankers, but in front of our local Safeway I see teachers and students selling brownies to buy basic school supplies. And now Governor Walker wants to take more away from the teachers. There is something a little sick about that set of priorities.
If we are a free people, if this is a free nation, then we have the freedom to say "no." The is no freedom without the freedom to say ,"No." The people of Wisconsin are saying "no" and we must all unite to join them.
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