Israeli arrested for entering Gaza
By Yaakov Katz, Jerusalem Post, 26 August 2008

Israeli pro-Palestinian activist Jeff Halper was arrested in Sderot on Tuesday for illegally entering Hamas-ruled Gaza, police said.

Halper reached Gazan shores on Saturday with dozens of Free Gaza Movement activists on two boats aimed at “breaking the siege” of the Strip.

Halper, who also heads the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions, crossed into Israel via the Erez border crossing, police said.

He was questioned at Sderot’s police station, and will be charged for violating the IDF’s Southern Command Front order which forbids Israeli citizens from entering Palestinian areas without permission, a Lachish police spokesman said.

“Halper will be taken to court tomorrow,” the spokesman said.

But Angela Godfrey-Goldstein, a spokeswoman for Free Gaza Movement, said Halper had entered Gaza with permission from Israel’s foreign and interior ministries. “I received a text message on my mobile phone saying that those two ministries had given the boats permission to land in Gaza. I remember thinking, that’s great because now they [the activists] are in Gaza legally,” she said.

Asked if she believed the “permission” included Israeli citizens, Godrey-Goldstein said, “it applied to the people on the boats.”

An hysterical lady in red for Clinton told MSNBC’s Dan Abrams today that Clinton supporters are not shifting support towards Obama because he hasn’t assumed Clinton’s campaign debt. Clinton spent herself millions into debt giving McCain the sound bites he is now using in ads against Obama. Where were Clinton’s devoted then and why should Obama’s supporters pay for the ads now?

When Hillary loses her second bid for the presidency in 2012, should McCain win in November, will it still be taboo to say racism was the reason some of Clinton’s supporters couldn’t vote for Obama or is the plan to go on cable news and shout that she lost due to it?

Unions stress over racism in the ranks
By Alexander Bolton, The Hill, 25 August 2008

DENVER — Racial prejudice is being cited among senior union leaders to explain Sen. Barack Obama’s difficulty in winning over support from white rank-and-file members.

Obama (D-Ill.) is counting on organized labor to help win him key electoral votes in Ohio, Michigan and other battleground states.

Karen Ackerman, political director for the AFL-CIO, acknowledged that Obama’s race is an important factor for some union members.

[Read the report]

Russia Formally Recognizes Abkhazia, S.Ossetia
Civil Georgia, Tbilisi / 26 Aug.’08 / 15:55

President Medvedev said he had signed a decree recognizing the independence of Georgia’s two breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

“Russia calls on other states to follow this decision,” he said. “This is not an easy choice, but this is the only possible way to save people’s lives.”

[Read the report]

Related: Bush Tells Russia not to Recognize Abkhazia, S.Ossetia

By Farooq Sulehria

Farooq Sulehria is a Labour Party Pakistan member who lives in Sweden. This interview first appeared in the Swedish radical weekly Arbetaren (Worker)

August 20, 2008 — Afghanistan lives in fear of US-sponsored warlords. These hated warlords are not scared by the Taliban monster raising its head in the south. But ironically, they live in the fear of an unarmed women in her late twenties: Malalai Joya.

To silence Joya’s defiant voice, the warlords who dominate the national parliament suspended Joya’s membership for three years in 2007. Earlier, at almost every parliamentary session she attended, she had her hair pulled or was physically attacked, and called names such as “whore”. “They even threatened me in the parliament with rape”, she says. But she neither toned down her criticism of the warlords (“they must be tried”) nor the US occupation of her country (“the ‘war on terror’ is a mockery”). Understandably, she’s been declared the “bravest woman in Afghanistan” and even compared with Burma’s Aung Sun Suu Kyi.

[Read the article]

CBC – Doc Zone: AFGHANISTAN, BETWEEN HOPE AND FEAR

Chapter 3:
Caught in the Act: Corruption
Watch

Greta’s Report on Monday’s Fishing

(Monday, August 25) I sat at the front of the fishing boat, one of six that went out this morning. They are old wooden boats, outfitted with bits and pieces of mechanical parts, rope twisted together and fishing nets. Israel has refused to let Palestinians fish in their own waters for the past 15 months. Even before that, they restricted Palestinian fishermen to around 6 miles. Now, they shoot holes in the boats and in the fishermen if they are caught farther out than about a kilometer.

[Read more]

Smiles and Tears in Gaza

Dear friends,

It was a day of smiles and a day of tears for me here in Gaza City. Another early press conference, followed by a visit to the hospital which has seen most of the carnage created in Gaza by Israeli bombs and rockets. The doctor related some of the difficulties faced by the population of Gaza. That 50 children have died because Israel refused to let them enter Israel for treatment. The reason given by Israel? The mothers were under 35 years old and could be terrorists. So the children died. He told us that so far 242 people have died during the siege because of Israel’s refusal to allow them to get the treatment they need. And that there have been 300 deliveries at checkpoints, resulting in 69 babies dead.

[Read more]