16 Dec 2011
The Staggering, True Costs of the Iraq War
The United States is withdrawing the last of its troops from Iraq this month, which makes now an appropriate time to begin weighing the costs and benefits to U.S. national security from our intervention there.
A U.S. Marine next to the dead body of a suspected insurgent during the ground offensive Nov. 9, 2004, in Fallujah, Iraq.
On May 1, 2003, President George W. Bush stood aboard the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and declared to the country and to the world that “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.” As Americans would quickly find out, President Bush’s declaration of victory was severely premature. Iraq would soon be in the throes of a violent insurgency and, eventually, a full-blown sectarian civil war.
15 Dec 2011
Child Soldiers in Thailand
The armed teenagers patrolling Thailand’s southern borderlands with state-backed militias are not kidnapped or brainwashed. They aren’t pumped full of drugs and few, if any, have ever killed.
Still, they operate with grown, gun-toting men defending against Asia’s bloodiest Islamic insurgency. And their dissimilarity with the world’s more horrific examples of child soldiering — think Burma or Liberia — is part of the reason they remain largely ignored.
Just as Thailand’s militia kids are overlooked, so is the conflict that has sucked them in. A little-known rebellion along the Thai-Malaysia border seeks to turn a Connecticut-sized territory into the world’s newest Islamic state. Since 2004, the insurgency has left roughly 4,800 dead.
The rebels’ daily shootings, bombings or stabbings have stoked paranoia among their targets: “infidels,” Thai Buddhists, and their “running dogs,” non-separatist Muslims with ties to the government.
To bolster forces, Thailand’s government has helped organize and arm a patchwork of self-defense militias, amounting to roughly 50,000 men and women, that patrol villages with shotguns and rifles.
London 2012 Olympics To Be Protected By 13,500 Armed Forces Personnel
Around 13,500 armed forces personnel will deployed to defend the London Olympics, the Ministry of Defence has announced.
Defence Secretary Philip Hammond said on Thursday that he expected 7,500 soldiers to be stationed around the Olympic venues in the capital itself, while the remainder provide security across the rest of the country at various events.
"This defence contribution is on a similar scale to that deployed at other recent Olympic Games and will contribute to ensuring a safe, secure and enjoyable 2012," he said. "Olympics. Defence will continue to be able to support current and contingent operations during the Games and my priority will remain the troops we have deployed on operations, including in Afghanistan, before, during and after the Olympics."
There are currently between 9,500 and 10,000 British armed forces personnel deployed in Afghanistan.
There will also be a 1,000 strong rapid-reaction force ready to respond to emergency situations. Hamond said the total venue guard-force would likely be around 23,700. The funding for security operations at London 2012 was recently doubled raising overall security costs for the 2012 games to more than 1 billion pounds
Chinese village besieged after protests
A standoff between villagers and police is continuing in southern China, where police have sealed off the village of Wukan in an attempt to quell an uprising, witnesses say.
Villagers have taken control of the town after staging protests over government land seizures and the death of a village leader in police custody last week. In response, authorities have cut off food supplies to the village of about 20,000 people in Guangdong province. A journalist in the village told Al Jazeera that Wednesday was the fourth straight day of the siege, with no signs that the villagers would budge.
"Police tried to retake the village on Sunday with a thousand armed police firing teargas and water cannons at villagers," Malcolm Moore of the British Daily Telegraph newspaper said. "But villagers stood firm and police fell back to form a cordon around the village, now basically choking off all supplies of food and water, waiting for the village to surrender. "There are no police or government officials left in the village. All of them have been driven out by angry villagers." Moore said he was told by locals that they had about 10 days of food supplies left and had no intention of giving up their resistance.
Tensions rose in September when protests by hundreds of villagers over a land dispute turned violent, with residents smashing buildings, overturning vehicles and clashing with police. Residents complained that their farmland was sold by local officials to developers to build factories without their consent. On Sunday, Xue Jinbo, a man accused of participating in the September land protest, died in police custody, further angering residents, who suspected he was beaten.
Afghan woman jailed after being raped is freed after two years in Kabul prison
An Afghan woman who was jailed after being raped by a cousin has been released from the Kabul prison where she has spent more than two years, although her lawyer has warned her future remains far from certain.
Gulnaz, a 20-year-old who is known by one name, was set free on Tuesday night, nearly two weeks after Hamid Karzai, the Afghanistan president, ordered her release. Her case has highlighted the issue of "moral crimes", which lawyers say have no basis in Afghan law.
Despite being the victim of a rape at the hands of a cousin, a day labourer called Asadullah Sher Mohammad, she was charged with "adultery" after reporting the attack to police and sentenced to 12 years in prison.
For two years and three months Gulnaz had been living in the Badam Bagh prison in Kabul with her daughter, who was conceived by the rape. Karzai had come under growing pressure in the weeks leading up to the recent conference on Afghanistan held in Bonn to release Gulnaz, who has become a symbol of the highly conservative Islamic country's failure to substantially improve the lot of women in the last 10 years.
Although the government said she would be released without any conditions, she has come under heavy pressure, including from a judge, to marry Sher Mohammad, who is in another prison in Kabul serving a rape sentence.
14 Dec 2011
Palestinian "Freedom Riders"
Six Palestinian activists boarded Israeli busses in an attempt to challenge the system of segregation in the West Bank. They were arrested at Hizmeh checkpoint, interrogated by Israel's internal intelligence agency, the Shabak, and released. In the West Bank, segregation is both visible with the separation wall, fence, and separate cities for Israelis and Palestinians and invisible with separate legal and security systems for the two peoples. The West Bank and the Gaza Strip have been under Israeli military occupation since 1967. The Real News' Lia Tarachansky spoke with Fesal Al Hatib, a Palestinian living in Hizmeh, a village divided in half by a road and the Wall.
Egged now also drives in The Netherlands
Israeli hate rally against Africans
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz mysteriously removed from its website an article exposing atrocious Israeli racism against black people just hours after it was published.
The article by David Sheen – a copy of which was made by The Electronic Intifada before Haaretz deleted it – reported on a rally by Israeli Jews on Sunday in Tel Aviv against African immigrants, demanding that they be sent home because Israel is a “Jewish state.” The rally was addressed by Michael Ben-Ari, a member of the Israeli parliament from the National Union party which also favors expelling Palestinians.
The deleted article stated:
The demonstrators chanted “The people demand the expulsion of the infiltrators,” “We have come to expunge the darkness,” and “Tel Aviv is for Jews, Sudan is for Sudanese.” Ben Ari criticized Prime Minister Netanyahu for allowing African migrants to remain in the county after they had already entered in recent years. He called Netanyahu’s cabinet “the blackest government ever for Tel Aviv.”
Video taken at the rally and posted on YouTube by Sheen, shows some of the vile racism, including by Knesset member Michael Ben-Ari. Protesters can be heard chanting such slogans as, “Sudanese to Sudan, Tel Aviv is for Jews” and “Their place is in Sudan, not here. This is a Jewish state!”
UFOs the Secret History
"Scrupulously accurate, intelligently conceived, UFOs: The Secret History is the thinking viewer's guide to the puzzles and paradoxes of an extraordinary phenomenon that continues to haunt our times and trouble our dreams. It is also gorgeously filmed - a feast to eye and mind, a thrilling experience on every level." - Jerome Clark, author of the award-winning, multi-volume UFO Encyclopedia. This film is a 65 minute abridged version.
False Perceptions Fuel Anti-Migrant Sentiments
The rising tide of anti-migrant sentiment worldwide is caused primarily by the biased, polarised and negative debate on migration, according to a new study released. In its latest World Migration Report released Tuesday, the Geneva- based International Organization for Migration (IOM) said people in destination countries tend to significantly overestimate the size of the migrant population, sometimes by as much as 300 percent.
As an example, the report points out that the actual percentage of migrants in Italy was around 7.0 percent in 2010. Yet polls showed that the population - rather erroneously - perceived this percentage to be around a staggering 25 percent. Similarly, in the United States, some public opinion polls showed that in 2010, the public believed the percentage of migrants in the population was at 39 percent, a far cry from an actual 14 percent.
The report points out that "distorted communication about migration contributes to widespread anti-migrant sentiments, which have recently resurfaced in many parts of the world." Harmful stereotypes, discrimination and even xenophobia have reappeared in societies of destination, resulting in controversy on the value of multiculturalism.
13 Dec 2011
Canada to withdraw from Kyoto Protocol
Canada will formally withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, the minister of the environment has said. Peter Kent said the protocol "does not represent a way forward for Canada" and the country would face crippling fines for failing to meet its targets.
The move, which is legal and was expected, makes it the first nation to pull out of the global treaty. The protocol, initially adopted in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997, is aimed at fighting global warming.
"Kyoto, for Canada, is in the past, and as such we are invoking our legal right to withdraw from Kyoto," Mr Kent said in Toronto. He said he would be formally advising the United Nations of his country's intention to pull out.
Saudi woman beheaded for 'sorcery'
A Saudi woman was beheaded Monday after being convicted of practising sorcery, which is banned in the ultra-conservative kingdom, the interior ministry said.
Amina bint Abdulhalim Nassar was executed in the northern province of Jawf for "practising witchcraft and sorcery," the ministry said in a statement carried by SPA state news agency. It is not clear how many women have been executed in the desert-kingdom, but another woman was beheaded in October for killing her husband by setting his house on fire.
Amnesty International said beheading took to 73 the number of executions in Saudi Arabia this year. The London-based human rights watchdog condemned Monday's execution as "truly appalling," and called on the conservative kingdom to urgently halt the practice.
"The charges of 'witchcraft and sorcery' are not defined as crimes in Saudi Arabia", said Philip Luther, Amnesty's interim director of the Middle East and North Africa. "To use them to subject someone to the cruel and extreme penalty of execution is truly appalling," he added in a statement, which stressed the "urgent need" to stop executions.
12 Dec 2011
The Great Dictator Speech
From The Great Dictator by Charles Chaplin
Music by The Dead Fish Orchestra
Mass protests in Russia put Putin under pressure
Could Vladimir Putin lose next year's presidential election? The very question shows just how much Russia has changed in such a short space of time. Less than three months ago, Mr Putin looked in total control.
On 24 September, when the Russian prime minister announced his intention to run again for president, few Russians doubted he would win. The Kremlin's system of "managed democracy" had pushed opponents to the fringes of Russian politics; TV coverage of Putin was all positive; December's Duma elections were going to be little more than a distraction on the way to Mr Putin returning triumphantly to the Kremlin, possibly for the next 12 years.
Suddenly, Vladimir Putin is looking weaker than at any time in his political career.
Jerusalem - Altar of Sacrifice
Heretic Productions present: Zen Gardner's "Jerusalem-Altar of Sacrifice" specially written piece in these troubled times.
Syrian army and defectors 'battling in south'
Hundreds of army defectors in southern Syria have fought with loyalist forces in one of the biggest armed confrontations in a nine-month uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, residents and activists said. Troops, mainly from the 12th Armoured Brigade, based in Isra, 40km from the border with Jordan, stormed the nearby town of Busra al-Harir, the Reuters news agency reported.
Al Jazeera's Nisreen El-Shamayleh, reporting from near the Jordan-Syria border, said that the clash started when "tens of tanks mounted with machine guns opened fire in that area earlier on Sunday morning to try to put an end to a general strike" called for by the opposition.
The sound of explosions and heavy machine guns was heard in Busra al-Harir and in Lujah, an area of rocky hills north of the town, where defectors have been hiding and attacking military supply lines. At least 22 people were killed by government troops on Sunday, including a woman and four children, activists said. Nine of them were killed in the city of Homs, six in Hama, three in Deraa, two in Idlib and another two outside of Damascus. At least five Syrian soldiers, including a military officer, were also reportedly killed.