Uploaded to YouTube.com by RussiaToday on Dec 18, 2011

The blog-o-sphere is boiling at the cruel beating of a female protester by Egyptian military police, who continued battling protesters in Tahrir Square on Sunday. The clashes, into their third day now, have left 10 people dead and hundreds injured. ­The video uploaded on YouTube Sunday reveals the extreme cruelty of the country’s law enforcers during the crackdown. The army soldiers in full riot gear have been savagely beating a seemingly unconscious female protester with big sticks, kicking her and stomping on her chest. Security forces lashed out ruthlessly on armless civilians and burned down tents that had been put up by activists outside the parliament building to camp in protest against the military rule. The internet community therefore questions the methods of the military regime who took over power after the ousting of the ex-President Hosni Mubarak in February.

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Uploaded to YouTube.com by AlJazeeraEnglish on Dec 17, 2011

Egypt’s prime minister says fighting since Friday between protesters and soldiers is an attack on the country’s revolution.

Eight people have been killed and hundreds injured in street battles, since renewed fighting erupted between protesters and security forces again on Saturday, on the streets leading to the parliament building and nearby Tahrir Square.

Al Jazeera’s Rawya Rageh reports from Cairo.

Yash Tandon

2011-12-13, Issue 563

The ‘aid industry’ fooled many into believing it was a necessary tool for development. But following the Busan forum on aid effectiveness, its time to rethink a world without it, writes Yash Tandon.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Fourth High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (HLF4) was held in Busan, Korea, 29 November – 1 December 2011. It is an end of a long journey that began with the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (PDAE) in 2005. It was a misguided journey right from the beginning. Its authors were probably well-intentioned, but they legitimised and built on a monstrous global aid industry that is largely Eurocentric and self-serving, and that has nursed illusions for over half a century. HLF4 was launched with much fanfare; but it ended with the recognition – finally – by the architects of the PDAE that they were on a wrong course. The Outcome Document talks of not ‘aid effectiveness’ but of ‘development cooperation’, which is what it should have been from the start; and it sets out the schedule for the ‘phasing out’ of the aid structures by June 2012. This paper is part of a larger story of how the ‘aid industry’ has managed to fool the rest of us for so long. It gives the main highlights of Busan’s final burial of this self-reproducing aid industry. The ‘industry’ will no doubt try and find other reasons to survive. Nonetheless, those not taken in by the industry must now rethink of a world without ‘aid’.[1]

Click here to continue reading “It is official: Busan heralds the dismantling of the aid industry” by Yash Tandon.

Ramallah, 15 December 2011 – Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF) have arrested nearly 470 Palestinians since 18 October 2011, when 477 Palestinian political prisoners were released in exchange for captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit as part of the first phase of the prisoner exchange deal concluded by the Israeli government and Hamas authorities. This wave of arrests reveals that the exchange deal has not deterred Israel’s policy of detention of Palestinians; rather, Israeli prisons are being refilled with almost the exact number of Palestinians that were released in October. Even the released prisoners were not safe from harassment, as the IOF has regularly raided their homes, issued summons to meet with Israeli intelligence and re-arrested one individual.

The 470 Palestinians who were arrested between 18 October and 12 December include about 70 children and 11 women. The IOF continued to employ brutal methods of arrest, including the use of undercover Israeli forces, commonly known as musta’arabeen, who dress as Palestinian civilians in order to carry out ambushes and arrests of Palestinians from their homes and places of work. In many cases, joint army and intelligence raids occurred after midnight, where soldiers deliberately destroyed contents of the houses they were searching. Of the 70 children arrested during this period, the majority are from Shuafat camp in Jerusalem and Dheisheh camp in Bethlehem. In the past two weeks alone, 11 children were arrested in Shuafat and 10 in Dheisheh. Two of the 11 women arrested in the past two months remain in detention. One of the released women is Isra Salhab, a journalist who spent more than 20 days in Moskobiyyeh interrogation center. Six of the women were arrested during a demonstration outside Hasharon prison, where they were calling for the release of female prisoners not included in the first phase of the prisoner exchange. Three of these women were released shortly after their arrest, and three were sentenced to house arrest.

Click here to continue reading “Addameer Concerned About Wave of Arrests since First Phase of Prisoner Exchange” | H/T Sam Bahour.

Transcripts of military interviews from the investigation into the Haditha massacre were found at this trailer in a junkyard in Baghdad, which specializes in selling trailers and office supplies left over from American military base closings.

By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT
Published: December 14, 2011

BAGHDAD — One by one, the Marines sat down, swore to tell the truth and began to give secret interviews discussing one of the most horrific episodes of America’s time in Iraq: the 2005 massacre by Marines of Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha.

“I mean, whether it’s a result of our action or other action, you know, discovering 20 bodies, throats slit, 20 bodies, you know, beheaded, 20 bodies here, 20 bodies there,” Col. Thomas Cariker, a commander in Anbar Province at the time, told investigators as he described the chaos of Iraq. At times, he said, deaths were caused by “grenade attacks on a checkpoint and, you know, collateral with civilians.”

The 400 pages of interrogations, once closely guarded as secrets of war, were supposed to have been destroyed as the last American troops prepare to leave Iraq. Instead, they were discovered along with reams of other classified documents, including military maps showing helicopter routes and radar capabilities, by a reporter for The New York Times at a junkyard outside Baghdad. An attendant was burning them as fuel to cook a dinner of smoked carp.

The documents — many marked secret — form part of the military’s internal investigation, and confirm much of what happened at Haditha, a Euphrates River town where Marines killed 24 Iraqis, including a 76-year-old man in a wheelchair, women and children, some just toddlers.

Click here to continue reading “Junkyard Gives Up Secret Accounts of Massacre in Iraq” by Michael S. Schmidt.