karmalised

Alison Weir
7 February 2010

Currently, the New York Times has only one bureau to cover Israel-Palestine. This is in Israel and its chief editor, Ethan Bronner, consistently shows Israeli bias, as I’ve noted in a number of previous postings (even apart from the fact that his son has recently entered the Israeli military). The Times‘ other major correspondent, Isabel Kershner, is an Israeli citizen.

New York Times Editor Bill Keller, in defending his decision to retain Bronner as their bureau chief despite Bronner’s conflict of interest and profoundly flawed track record, writes that he feels Bronner’s intimate family ties with Israel “supply a measure of sophistication about Israel and its adversaries.”

[Read the report]

Weapons projects undermine Obama’s disarmament vision, critics say

By Joshua McElwee

New nuclear weapons projects are planned at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and the Kansas City Plant in Missouri. In fact, the pace of nuclear component development at these sites appears to be increasing.

For example, a major new nuclear component plant is well into the planning stage in Kansas City and it is to replace the aging current plant.

Each city’s weapons facility creates parts for U.S. nuclear weapons.

Nickolas Roth, director of the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability, said the work at these plants involves “substantial new nuclear weapons projects.”

[Read the report]

Malalai Joya talks about her hopes for her country, her heroes and the London conference

Interview by Mehdi Hasan

According to US government sources, more than $60bn in aid has been given to Afghanistan since 2001. Such a huge amount could have turned Afghanistan into a paradise, if it were properly spent. But that money did not reach the needy people, so I am sure that any other amount sent in future will have no impact on poor Afghans and will only widen the gap between rich and poor.

Over 70 per cent of Afghans are living below the poverty line, but the Afghan government spent $4.2m on a luxury apartment in the Trump World Tower in New York for Zahir Tanin, the permanent representative of Afghanistan to the United Nations. This is one small example how the international aid is wasted.

The conference will prepare the ground for the return to power of the Taliban and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Islamic Party [Hezb-e-Islami]. The Afghan government says it will ask the world leaders there to remove the name of Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, from the Security Council’s blacklist. Ordinary Afghans have no faith in such conferences.

[Read the interview]

By The Associated Press
h/t

The Justice Ministry declared Sunday that no indictments will be filed against police in the case of an American activist who was hit by a tear gas canister and left comatose during a violent demonstration in the West Bank last year.

Tristan Anderson, 38, of Oakland, California, was critically injured during a Palestinian protest in the West Bank village of Naalin last March. Amir Moran, spokesman for Israel’s Tel Hashomer hospital, where Anderson is being treated, said his condition has not changed.

Justice Ministry spokesman Ron Roman said the investigation determined there was no criminal intent in harming Anderson. The investigation was opened in May and closed several weeks ago, but results were made public only Sunday.

Human rights groups charge Anderson’s case highlights a culture of impunity toward Israeli forces, because incidents of harm against Palestinians and their supporters are rarely investigated and few reach prosecution.

[Read more]

Yash Tandon
Pambazuka News
2010-01-28, Issue 467

Haiti is a tragedy for us all. It is a tragedy for you and me. It is a tragedy for Africa, for the poor countries of Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. An earthquake is a global phenomenon, it can happen anywhere. It can happen in the US, in Europe and in Japan. So why then is it so destructive in its effects in the countries of the South? It is because of the failure of development. Haiti is a microcosm of the disastrous outcome of the failed so-called ‘development’ policies of the last thirty years in the South, and the destructive effects of foreign interventionist policies in the affairs of the poor countries of the South – from Somalia to Bangladesh to Haiti.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s first democratically elected president, in his passionate book, The Eyes of the Heart: Seeking a Path for the Poor in the Age of Globalization gives a graphic account of what happens when local economies and local initiatives of a poor country like Haiti are subordinated to the will of global finance and corporate power masked by the ideologies of ‘free trade’ and ‘development aid’. ‘In a world oriented only toward profit, it may be difficult for us to hear God’s voice among the din and the racket of the moneychangers who have filled the world’s temples’, he writes.

He describes how he had to wrestle with his heart and mind to resist the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) that was being forced on him as a condition for donor aid. When he remained faithful to his heart and mind, he was forced out of power. The government that replaced him relented to the pressure of the donors and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)/World Bank (WB). In 2004 in what he described as his ‘kidnapping’ with the connivance of France and the US, he was forced into exile. He was unceremoniously transported first to Jamaica and then, eventually, to South Africa.

[Read the article]