TOKYO – During most of his 12 years in office, Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), was a thorn in the side of president George W Bush and others in his administration cleaving to a hard line on Iraq and Iran.
Relations sank after ElBaradei publicly questioned Washington’s rationale for going to war with Iraq in 2003 and they never recovered. He openly criticized US hints that it might go to war with Iran over its uranium-enrichment program and deplored Washington’s withholding of information on the suspected Syrian nuclear site until after the Israelis bombed it in 2007.
Luxembourg (Reuters) – A U.N. panel will next week recommend that the world ditch the dollar as its reserve currency in favor of a shared basket of currencies, a member of the panel said on Wednesday, adding to pressure on the dollar.
Currency specialist Avinash Persaud, a member of the panel of experts, told a Reuters Funds Summit in Luxembourg that the proposal was to create something like the old Ecu, or European currency unit, that was a hard-traded, weighted basket.
by Pratap Chatterjee, Special to CorpWatch, 23 March 2009
A new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan will be unveiled by President Barack Obama this week. A centerpiece of the new strategy is a plan to ramp up the training of the Afghan army and police at a cost of some $2 billion a year, an astronomical sum in Afghanistan where the entire government budget is about half that amount. Another key part of the plan is expected to be an effort to divide and conquer the Taliban with a mix of negotiations and targeted missile strikes in Pakistan.
CorpWatch, in association with KPFA radio, traveled to Afghanistan recently to interview a variety of Afghans from students to parliamentarians on their views of what Obama should do in their country. A video version of our interviews can be seen here.
Jerusalem – Ma’an – A woman and journalist were among those beaten by Israeli troops during a press conference held by the parents of critically wounded American peace activist Tristan Anderson Monday afternoon.
Anderson had an Israeli tear-gas canister shot at his head in Ni’lin on 13 March, his skull shattered and several surgeries have left him semi-conscious in a Tel Aviv hospital. His parents arrived shortly after Tristan was hospitalized.
There are those who would lend reason and rhyme to this “shitting of houses”, that it’s a necessary evil committed by soldiers who are under fire and have no alternatives, or is an atrocity committed only against sworn enemies of the Israeli state.
Israeli house-cleaning: on the looters
As’sad AbuKhalil, The Angry Arab News Service, 21 March 2009
From Jean Said Makdisi’s (1990:190) memoir, Beirut Fragments:
“After the Israelis left [Beirut in 1982], […]
Gradually, we discovered that what had seemed like a single incident had become, in fact, a trademark and taken on far more serious dimensions.
The Israeli soldiers, wherever they had been, had defecated in choice places. On books, furniture, clothes, and carpets; on bedroom floors; near toilet seats and in bathtubs; on school desks; and in shop windows, people found the rotting feces. Someone swore she knew of one house near the airport where the distraught housewife had discovered feces in her washing machine and dishwasher. One man, we heard, went to his office and saw on every single desk except his own the offensive, stinking pile. Triumphantly, he sat at his desk and gloated over his unhappy colleagues. Then he opened his drawer, and there, neatly lying among the files, was his bequest from the Israeli army.
And so, after all the ruin and tragedy, after the destruction and pain, the dead and the dying, the lacerated bodies and blinded eyes, the burned and disfigured faces, the widows and orphans—after all this there was left only a great heap of excrement. The fires had died, snuffed out in a mound of dung. A ghastly joke, symbol of an overriding contempt, a cosmic stink had become the memorial to those months of agony. (thanks Robert)
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