Israel’s army shot an 18-year-old Palestinian in the head in the West Bank town of Ni’ilin, just hours after the village buried a 10-year-old who had also been shot in the head by a soldier.
Eyewitnesses said the 18-year-old, Ahmed Yousef Amirah, was shot at close range when a military jeep drove past and an officer fired three rubber bullets at him from within the vehicle.
It is the third incident this month in which Israel’s military appears to have deliberately targeted a resident of Ni’ilin, where protests against Israel’s West Bank barrier and violent clashes occur almost daily.
Amirah was shot around 7.30pm, around four hours after 10-year-old Ahmed Moussa was buried in the village cemetery next to his parent’s house.
LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) — The AIDS epidemic among African-Americans in some parts of the United States is as severe as in parts of Africa, according to a report out Tuesday.
“Left Behind – Black America: A Neglected Priority in the Global AIDS” (.pdf) is intended to raise awareness and remind the public that the “AIDS epidemic is not over in America, especially not in Black America,” says the report, published by the Black AIDS Institute, an HIV/AIDS think tank focused exclusively on African-Americans.
“AIDS in America today is a black disease,” says Phill Wilson, founder and CEO of the institute and himself HIV-positive for 20 years. “2006 CDC data tell us that about half of the just over 1 million Americans living with HIV or AIDS are black.”
Although black people represent only about one in eight Americans, one in every two people living with HIV in the United States is black, the report notes.
Self-determination is a fundamental principle of international lawi that enshrines the rights of individuals and peoples to freely pursue their economic, social, and cultural development, and the obligation of all states to respect and promote the realisation of these rights in conformity with the provisions of the UN Charter. For the Palestinian people, the lack of statehood, continued military occupation, and dispossession are key obstacles to self- determination. A less obvious obstacle to Palestinian self-determination is the international aid system itself.
Palestinians in the occupied territory are the largest per capita (not absolute) recipients of international aid, but despite the billions of dollars spent, “development” has not resulted. Whereas the 60-year-long conflict with Israel is the obvious source of the problem, the international aid system is exacerbating hopelessness and helplessness by objectifying beneficiaries and making them feel like beggars. Palestinians’ lack of control over nearly all aspects of their lives – including how resources are used on their behalf – contradicts all enabling factors for health, democracy, sustainable development, and non-violent social change.
Dalia Association, the first Palestinian “community foundation” was established in 2007 after founders conducted more than 150 interviews with Palestinian civil society activists, development professionals, and philanthropy experts. We found that governmental donors’ well-funded agendas are suffocating indigenous leadership, local initiative, and self-reliance. Palestinian civil society has lost credibility and impact through its dependence on international aid. Many Palestinian NGOs have become accountable to donors and alienated from the grassroots. Volunteerism, once vibrant, has given way to passivity as millions of people have come to rely on food aid, free shelter, and handouts. In other words, our research found that the international aid system disempowers Palestinians and denies their right to self- determination in the development process.ii
A 10 year old boy called Ahmed Ussam Yusef Mousa was shot dead at approximately 6pm near the Palestinian village of Nil’in. He was shot once in the head at close range with live ammunition.
In 2004, god, guns and gays were invoked to inflame interest in voting. In 2008, the GOP will race-bait to boost the chances of its floundering candidate by placing affirmative action abolition on the ballot.
Democrats will dismiss how deeply and abidingly racism inflects the innards of voting Americans and will dumpster dive for cliches that support affirmative action rather than suggest alternatives that do not perpetuate class warfare and discrimination.
The Obama-loving media is still going on about his alleged arrogance. MSNBC’s political director, Chuck Todd, said today that despite poll numbers, unless he stumbles several times, this is Obama’s race to win by hitching a ride on the coat tails of Democrats. Jay Carney, Washington Bureau Chief for Time Magazine, reminded that voters resent it when the candidate or the media call the race.
I nearly grow accustomed to the inevitability of McCain’s coronation until he opens his mouth and the prospects of his gaffes and guffaws being stamped with a presidential seal shiver my soul.
Obama could rejuvenate interest in his mundane candidacy and prepare for the knockout punch by putting Tim Kaine to work clearing rhetorical land mines and breaking new ground on abortion.
Fatima Hassan, is a prominent South African human rights lawyer who was part of a South African Human Rights Delegation that in early July visited the Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The delegation undertook the mission in order to: “support those, Palestinian and Israeli, working daily, by non-violent means, to bring an end to the post-1967 Israeli occupation, to end all human rights abuses and breaches of international law, and to move towards peaceful relations and a just settlement…to express solidarity with those who are living in oppressive, restrictive and dangerous circumstances; and to to draw attention to the injustice of the occupation and its devastating consequences.” Mukoma Wa Ngugi interviewed Fatima Hassan on the solidarity visit and the implications of the Palestinian struggle for Africans.
PAMBAZUKA NEWS: Well, let’s get straight to it: A Independent Newspaper article quotes you as saying “The issue of separate roads, [different registration] of cars driven by different nationalities, the indignity of producing a permit any time a soldier asks for it, and of waiting in long queues in the boiling sun at checkpoints just to enter your own city, I think is worse than what we experienced during apartheid.” But the same article goes on to say that “Ms Hassan herself said she thought the apartheid comparison was a potential “red herring.” Can you speak more about this?
Cable talking heads accuse broadcast networks of liberal bias — but a think tank finds that ABC, NBC and CBS were tougher on Barack Obama than on John McCain in recent weeks.
Haters of the mainstream media reheated a bit of conventional wisdom last week.
Barack Obama, they said, was getting a free ride from those insufferable liberals.
Such pronouncements, sorry to say, tend to be wrong since they describe a monolithic media that no longer exists. Information today cascades from countless outlets and channels, from the Huffington Post to Politico.com to CBS News and beyond.
But now there’s additional evidence that casts doubt on the bias claims aimed — with particular venom — at three broadcast networks.
The Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, where researchers have tracked network news content for two decades, found that ABC, NBC and CBS were tougher on Obama than on Republican John McCain during the first six weeks of the general-election campaign.
Fawzia al-Kurd’s home is nothing special. She has lived within its walls for the past quarter of a century, in the heart of East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah district. The house is tidy. But at first glance, it would not appear to be worth $10m.
That is the sum that the al-Kurd family claim they were offered by Israeli buyers as an incentive to move on, a figure confirmed by their lawyer. Fawzia refused to make a deal, whatever the price. It would have hurt her ‘integrity’ to take it and leave, she said. So last week she received an eviction notice, based on an arcane legal claim to the site that her husband first called home in 1956.
If she and her family are forced to leave as a result, ultra-Orthodox Israeli settlers from a company called Nahlat Shemoun – linked to a nearby Jewish shrine – will take over half of the house. Settlers have already occupied her illegally built extension. The Kurd house may soon be draped with Israeli flags – as is another a handful of metres distant – and Arab East Jerusalem will have shrunk perceptibly once more.
‘Their objective [in trying to evict me] is political’, said Fawzia. ‘They are claiming as theirs something that is not.’
There are similarities between Senator Barack Obama’s visits to Jordan and Germany: Mr. Obama has chosen historic backgrounds for his outdoor appearances.
In Germany, Mr. Obama spoke to an adoring crowd just a few feet away from where the Berlin Wall once stood. In Jordan, the Senator held his first public event near the Temple of Hercules, part of the Citadel complex on a hill overlooking Amman, the capital. The audience however, consisted of an army of reporters, most of whom had travelled with the Senator from the U.S. with few local ones amongst them. A small gathering of onlookers was kept at bay by the Jordanian security forces. Obama-mania was not present!
According to a recent survey from the Pew Research Center, only 22 percent of Jordanians who are following the U.S. presidential election have confidence in the Senator from Illinois. Many Arabs believe that U.S. foreign policy will not change for the better with a new president, according to the same report. The reason, in my opinion, is because most Arabs do not see the U.S. as an honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In the news, McCain goes to a grocery store in Bethlehem, Pennsylania and invites the press.
Suzanne Smalley, on the scene for Newsweek, was amongst the first to refer to it as an “unscheduled campaign stop.” She went on to report:
[...] Renee Gould, the young mother McCain had an extended chat with about the high price of tomatoes and milk, was not a random shopper, but an area resident funneled to the campaign by the local Republican Party. Gould’s admission (a reporter cornered her and asked how she came to be there) was ultimately not all that surprising. Even with the amusing mishaps, the entire event came off as canned, and McCain—whose discomfort with the phoniness required by politics has always been evident—spent most of his time shifting uncomfortably.
Still, McCain did what he could to stick to his message, reading from a note card in his hand [...]
The event may not have been on whatever schedule has been issued to reporters but there was a script and an actor recruited. The press was notified. It would be more appropriate to say the photo op was scheduled at the last minute. McCain didn’t get a notion to pop into a grocery store and speak with customers about the price of a gallon of milk. It was pre-arranged.
Yet another example of reporters and their employers manufacturing excuses for McCain’s unappealing personality and desperate campaign moves.
McCain isn’t phony, he is discomfited by it. Nothing prevented McCain from tossing the note card and carrying on a conversation with the young mother worried about the rising cost of groceries. He didn’t do so because he is a remote, calloused politician who requires direction and cue cards, and even when rehearsed, performs below industry standards.
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