by Khalid Amayreh
July 30, 2006
On 23 March, 1944, 33 German soldiers were killed when members of an Italian resistance group set off a bomb close to a column of German troops who were marching on via Rasella. Adolph Hitler got furious and ordered that within 24 hours, ten Italians were to be shot for each dead German. Herbert Kappler, the local German commander, quickly compiled a list of 320 civilians who were to be killed. On 24 March, the victims were transported to Adreatine caves where they were summarily executed by the SS.
Numerous similar "pacification operations" were carried out by the Nazi armies against civilians throughout Nazi-occupied Europe, in which men, women and children were brutally killed to avenge the death of German soldiers by local resistance fighters.
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Kurt Nimmo
ANother Day in the Empire
Friday July 28th 2006
As expected, Israel plans to completely flatten southern Lebanon and murder anybody who remains there, no matter there are thousands of people unable to leave-the sick, elderly, and those without resources.
"Everyone remaining in southern Lebanon will be regarded as a terrorist, Israel's justice minister said yesterday as the military prepared to employ 'huge firepower' from the air in its campaign to crush Hizbollah," reports the
Telegraph.
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I have to ask--who is the real terrorist??? Conal Urquhart in Gaza City
Friday July 28, 2006
The Guardian
The voice sounded friendly enough. "Hi, my name is Danny. I'm an officer in Israeli military intelligence. In one hour we will blow up your house."
Mohammed Deeb took the telephone call seriously and told his family and neighbours to get out of the building. An hour later, an Israeli helicopter fired three missiles at the four-storey building in Gaza City, destroying the ground floor and damaging the upper storeys.
Mr Deeb was on the receiving end of a new Israeli tactic of using telephone, radio and leaflets to warn Gazans of impending attacks. The army claims it is an attempt to minimise civilian casualties, but Palestinians say it is a new way of terrorising the population.
Raji Serrani, the director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), which has collected several examples of the tactic, described it as "psychological warfare", adding: "Since when did Israel feel the need to warn people that they were about to bomb their homes? They are simply playing with people's minds and inflicting a new panic in Gaza."
LINK
By Jennie Matthew in Gaza City
July 28, 2006
"WHEN the bomb exploded from the plane I felt I was in hell, real hell," shouts 31-year-old Ghassan stabbing the air with his finger and straining over the side of his grubby hospital bed.
Professing allegiance to Palestinian national security but parroting ideology attune to armed factions, Ghassan went to Gaza's Maghazi refugee camp last week to fight the Israelis during a particularly bloody incursion.
"I feel chemicals. I feel high heat, I feel high pain," he elaborates in English, both legs heavily bandaged, as patients and visitors brush past in a crowded corridor of Gaza's Al-Shifa hospital.
"They found shrapnel with 'test' written on it," he shouts.
Accusations abound that the Israelis, pressing a nearly five-week offensive in which 130 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, are using a new weapon.
Doctors say they have never before seen such specific burn injuries, concentrated so much on the lower body and causing such a high propensity of amputations. The Health Ministry has already called for an independent inquiry.
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by William Hughes
26 July 06
Washington, D.C. - Close to 400 protesters showed up for a spirited demonstration on Tuesday, July 25, 2006, at the Israeli Embassy, 514 International Drive, NW, in the nation’s capital. They were there, despite the sweltering heat, to express their strong opposition to the ongoing barbaric conduct of the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) in Lebanon, as well as in Gaza. The IOF has given new meaning to the term “collective punishment” by their reckless, disproportionate and murderous treatment of the Lebanese and Palestinian civilian populations. It is a war crime under the provisions of the 4th Geneva Convention, (Article 33), to deliberately target a protected population for punishment.
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From: Reuters
By Bernie Woodall And Leonard Anderson in Los Angeles and San Francisco
July 26, 2006
CALIFORNIA has sweltered under record-breaking, 50-plus temperatures again, pushing up the heat-related death toll and straining the state's power grid.
With temperatures soaring as high as 51.6C in parts of the state since Sunday, about 50 deaths have been blamed on the heat, but the actual death toll remained uncertain.
Most victims were elderly people living in California's central valley, which was under its fifth straight day of excessive heat warnings.
Weather forecasters expected a slight cooling trend in the next few days.
"This is a historic heat wave," Joe Desmond, undersecretary of energy affairs for the California Resources Agency, said.
Mr Desmond said this was the first time in 57 years that both Northern and Southern California had endured record-breaking heat at the same time.
About 66,000 homes and businesses were without power yesterday in scattered outages resulting from neighbourhood transformers blowing rather than key infrastructure failing.
The Fresno County Coroner said today so many bodies had arrived in the past few days that she could not give an accurate figure for heat-related deaths.
"We cannot keep up. We have had an incredible influx in the last few days. We have capacity for 50 and we have no room for anyone else," Coroner Loralee Cervantes told Reuters.
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25 July 2006 16:21
And that could speed up global warming with 'incalculable consequences', says alarming new research
By Geoffrey Lean in Manaus and Fred Pearce
Published: 23 July 2006
The vast Amazon rainforest is on the brink of being turned into desert, with catastrophic consequences for the world's climate, alarming research suggests. And the process, which would be irreversible, could begin as early as next year.
Studies by the blue-chip Woods Hole Research Centre, carried out in Amazonia, have concluded that the forest cannot withstand more than two consecutive years of drought without breaking down.
Scientists say that this would spread drought into the northern hemisphere, including Britain, and could massively accelerate global warming with incalculable consequences, spinning out of control, a process that might end in the world becoming uninhabitable.
The alarming news comes in the midst of a heatwave gripping Britain and much of Europe and the United States. Temperatures in the south of England reached a July record of 36.3C on Tuesday. And it comes hard on the heels of a warning by an international group of experts, led by the Eastern Orthodox " pope" Bartholomew, last week that the forest is rapidly approaching a " tipping point" that would lead to its total destruction.
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Israel's leading historian on the topic, Benny Morris, although having done more than anyone else to clarify exactly what happened, nonetheless concludes that, morally, it was a good thing - just as, in his view, the "annihilation" of Native Americans was a good thing - that, legally, Palestinians have no right to return to their homes, and that, politically, Israel's big error in 1948 was that it hadn't "carried out a large expulsion and cleansed the whole country - the whole Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan" of Palestinians. [Norman Finkelstein]
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Joe Quinn
Signs of the Times20/07/2006
At the moment, many writers in the alternative media are feeling extremely angry, depressed and frustrated at what is happening in Palestine and Lebanon. Despite hundreds of editorials and essays eloquently decrying Israeli aggression and provocation and spelling out the very obvious reason for the long-standing violence in the Middle East, Israel continues its murderous rampage, killing almost 70 Lebanese civilians yesterday.
Yesterday's attacks involved Israeli bombing of entire Lebanese villages, such as Srifa in the south west of Lebanon where Israeli F-16 jets, supplied free of charge by the US government, destroyed 15 houses, killed at least 20, and wounded at least 30, men women, young and old alike. The truly horrifying thing however is that the inhabitants of the villages were fleeing on the orders of the Israeli government itself, yet as the villagers attempted to leave in their cars and vans, they were targeted by Israeli jets and blown to pieces...
~ Read More ~
Updated 1:40 PM on Tuesday, July 18, 2006
By HOLLY HUFFMAN
Eagle Staff Writer
State veterinarians on Monday were investigating the mysterious, overnight deaths of two dozen horses housed at a Brazos County stable - the most unusual mass horse casualty in recent memory, according to animal health officials.
The horses had been boarded at Carousel Acres Equestrian Center and Stable in southern Brazos County. The first horse appears to have gotten sick at about 4 p.m. Sunday and, one by one, 23 more fell ill and died, stable owner Beverly Raphel said.
Another 11 were sick but recovering - five at the Texas A&M University's Large Animal Clinic and six at Carousel Acres, where they were being treated by medical personnel, Aggieland Animal Health Center Veterinarian Barbara Hannes said. Hannes was the first doctor to arrive Sunday at the stable.
The cause of the outbreak had not been pinpointed late Monday, but Hannes did point to the possibility that the horses' feed had been contaminated by a toxin.
A Brazos County sheriff's deputy was called to the scene but Sheriff Chris Kirk said his department had not launched a formal investigation because it appeared the horses were accidentally poisoned after eating feed treated for weevils.
Raphel said she found the first ailing horse after she arrived home from practice with the Texas Ladies Aside, an equestrian drill team.
With temperatures hovering just below 100 degrees, Raphel said she and husband Bradley Raphel - co-owners since 1998 - assumed the horse was suffering from heat exhaustion and began trying to cool the animal down. But their efforts didn't work, she said, and neither did efforts made by veterinarians who had come to help.
"After a while, after you've worked on them after one or two die, it starts dawning on you it's not heat exhaustion. There's too many sick," Raphel said Monday afternoon, her voice weak and sorrowful.
Raphel said about two-thirds of the affected horses belonged to her and her husband. The remaining animals were being boarded at the facility, she said.
"We lost our main stallion and we lost some of our babies. We lost some of our top mares and, of course, our borders' horses are important too," Raphel said. "It's a tragedy. It's just hard to believe something like that could happen."
Panic seemed to seep through the Brazos Valley agricultural community as news of the mass casualties spread through Bryan and College Station. But A&M officials tried to allay residents' worries.
Texas A&M's College of Veterinary Medicine Dean H. Richard Adams has not seen or treated the affected horses, but said based on historical data he thought it unlikely that such an incident would be caused by a virus or disease. It would take more than a few hours for a disease - which has incubation and infectious stages- to spread from horse to horse, he said.
"This event itself is an extraordinarily uncommon event. It suggests that something in that environment proved to be highly toxic to those animals," Adams said. "But as to what it is and to the source it's going to take some diagnostic testing before those questions can be answered."
Adams said it likely would take several days before results were returned. The Texas Veterinary Medical Diagnostic Lab collected samples of feed and bedding at the stable and will run tests for unusual compounds. Necropsies are being performed on the dead horses, he said.
Meanwhile, doctors at the vet clinic were focusing on the five horses in their care, working to keep them medically stable and preparing to treat any symptoms that might occur.
The A&M vet clinic collaborates with the College Station-based diagnostic lab, which is a part of the A&M System, but the two are independent entities, Adams said.
Representatives with the Brazos County Health Department said they were unaware of the horse casualties and not involved in the investigation.
Late Monday, Raphel recalled how frightened she was as she sat with the dying horses. It seemed to take forever for help to arrive, she said. But slowly dozens of people -community members, veterinarians and even volunteer firefighters - began to arrive, and Raphel felt a sense of appreciation flood over her, she said.
Many of those horse-lovers remained at the stable throughout the night as they kept watch over the dozens of remaining horses.
Sandra Smith, a College Station chiropractor, was one of the devoted. She arrived at about 6 p.m. and spent about eight hours vigilantly watching over both her horse, a Peruvian Paso, and others. The horses seemed to be stricken at random with the illness, she said, explaining that owners with two horses might have one that was sick and one that seemed fine.
"It was just heartbreaking to see the animals," added Smith, whose horse, Orion, has not yet shown any symptoms. "Everybody just really, really worked like Trojans. Everybody that was out there just gave their whole heart and soul to try and make the difference and just couldn't."
All the remaining horses were given new hay and feed as a precautionary measure, Smith said, adding that anything that might have been contaminated was removed.
On Monday afternoon, Smith expressed sympathy for the Raphels, who often work with young children and the disabled at their equine center. She wept as she recalled friends' horses that also were boarded at the stable but hadn't been as lucky as 11-year-old Orion, whom she bought from the Raphels last August.
"I had learned to love them even though they didn't belong directly to me," Smith said. "You learn to love them all."
Eli Stephens
Left I on the News
July 13, 2006
Israel says the seizing of two Israeli soldiers by Hizballah is an "act of war" (on the part of the Lebanese government). I wonder what they consider this to be, then?
Police said 52 Lebanese civilians, including 15 children, were killed in attacks on Hezbollah targets in Beirut's southern suburbs and across southern Lebanon.
Security sources said the air strikes in south Lebanon also wounded 100 people. Ten members of a family were killed in Dweir village and seven family members died in Baflay.
Note that Israel has not declared war. Therefore these acts can be nothing other than war crimes. Not that most of the Israeli attacks wouldn't qualify as war crimes even if they had declared war.
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Astronomers were fending off scores of calls on Friday from Norwegians who reported hearing what experts are calling a meteor explosion over southeast Norway, somewhere over the Oslo Fjord area.
NORSAR, in Kjeller, has registered a signal from the explosion. Officials at NORSAR and at the University of Oslo said there likely are remnants of the meteor lying on the ground between Gardermoen to the northeast of Oslo and Askim to the southeast.
"I urge people to search for particles that may have fallen to earth," astronomer Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaard told Aftenposten.no. He said the stones would be black and magnetic.
Seismologist Johannes Schweitzer was on duty at NORSAR Friday morning, when the meteor is believed to have exploded around 10:15am.
He said he got a signal from one of NORSAR's stations about 10 minutes after the explosion. "That correlates to information we have had from astronomers," he said. He thinks the meteor explosion was probably somewhat less forceful than the one recorded at NORSAR stations on June 7 in northern Norway.
Calls streamed in all day from Strømstad, Sweden in the south to Notodden and Jessheim in the north, placed by people who heard the explosion or saw a flash streaking through the bright blue sky Friday morning.
It was said to have been travelling in a north, northwest direction.
"This sounds extremely exciting," said astronomer Kaare Aksnes of the astro-physics institute at the University of Oslo.
He received a call from Stein Kjetil Overrein in Halden, near the Swedish border, who reported seeing a flash hurtling through the sky, and hearing an explosion minutes later. After calling the police, he called Aksnes.
E-mailed reports of the incident were also streaming in to the university from all over the Oslo area.
It's at least the second meteor incident in Norway in recent weeks. A meteorite was photographed streaking through the light night sky east of Tromsø on June 7, and last week a resident of Stavanger reported finding a meteorite in his yard. The latter report, however, hasn't been confirmed and may have been a hoax.
If they do, fire 'will be almost impossible to stop
Thursday, July 13, 2006; Posted: 1:44 p.m. EDT (17:44 GMT)
YUCCA VALLEY, California (AP) -- A wildfire that has already burned 40,000 acres and destroyed 100 buildings roared through high desert wilderness Thursday, threatening to merge with a fire in national forest land filled with dead, dry trees.
"If it starts in there it will be almost impossible to stop," California Department of Forestry spokeswoman Karen Guillemin said of the fire edging toward San Bernardino National Forest.
The blaze, about five miles from a 1,200-acre fire in the forest, was mainly consuming fast-burning fuel such as greasewood, Joshua trees and brush.
If it expands from the high desert to the mountains, it could grow more devastating by burning millions of larger trees killed in recent years by a severe bark beetle infestation.
The fire, ignited by weekend lightning, destroyed 42 houses, 55 other buildings and 91 vehicles in and around Yucca Valley, about 100 miles east of Los Angeles, authorities said.
As of Thursday morning, it was considered only about one-fourth contained and thousands of structures remained threatened.
Firefighters were unable to save a trailer that was home to Justus H. Motter, 89.
"All my personal things were in there -- my wedding pictures, the pictures of my niece. It's an awful loss," he said.
The blaze sent a column of smoke thousands of feet into the air. Authorities said the smoke could be smelled as far away as Ogden, Utah, and Las Vegas.
About 1,350 firefighters were battling the larger fire in triple-digit temperatures and strong wind gusts. Nine firefighters and two civilians were treated for minor burns or smoke inhalation.
About 1,000 evacuees from Pioneertown, Burns Canyon, Rimrock, Gamma Gulch, Flamingo Heights and Little Morongo Canyon had not returned to their homes, said Capt. Marc DeRosier of the California Department of Forestry.
Pioneertown is a historic area where Westerns starring Gene Autry and Roy Rogers were filmed, but the fire spared saloons and Western style store fronts used in those movies. (Watch how fire roared through Pioneertown -- 1:34)
In the Gamma Gulch area, dead animals littered a property where a home and barn burned.
"We drove through a wall of flames to get out," Robin Thomas of Pike's Canyon told The Sun of San Bernardino. "This was the most beautiful place in the high desert, the greenest place. Now all the vegetation is gone."
Elsewhere in the West, several new wildfires in southern Montana spread quickly -- one to an estimated 10,000 acres -- because of windy weather.
At least one house on the Crow Indian Reservation was reported destroyed by a blaze, said Jon Kohn, an information officer for the Crow Agency Bureau of Indian Affairs' Forestry division.
There also was a 3,150-acre wildfire west of Columbus, and another burning north of Pompeys Pillar that was estimated at 10,000 acres, said Mary Apple, a spokeswoman with the Bureau of Land Management.
Wildfires have burned more than 4 million acres nationwide, almost twice the 10-year average for this time of year, according to National Interagency Fire Center.
Silvia Cattori interviews a Palestinian doctor
11 July 2006
Interview with Doctor Juma Saka of the Hospital Shifa in Gaza
Q: It seems that you are receiving people with wounds that are very difficult to treat. Do you know what kind of arms are being used?
A: We dont know exactly what kind of weapon it was but we suggest it was a chemical weapon or a weapon with radio-radiation [inaudible] they also had a very strong explosion. There was shrapnel trapped in the bodies.
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July 11, 2006
INTERVIEW WITH A DIXIE CHICK
"Let them Hate Us"
Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks discusses her group's new album and her outspoken criticism of US President George W. Bush, the boycotts, the death threats, their betrayal by Nashville and why the group is "not ready to make nice."
The Dixie Chicks began their careers in the late 1980s as tradition-conscious country darlings. They fiddled Bluegrass numbers and warbled harmless tunes like "I Want To be a Cowboy's Sweetheart." Their career took off in 1995, when singer Natalie Maines joined the band, which was formed by sisters Martie Maguire and Emily Robinson. Their album "Wide Open Spaces" sold 12 million copies in the United States alone. But later, they became a lighting rod for controversy, with songs like "Goodbye Earl," a ditty about domestic violence in which an abused wife takes deadly revenge on her no-good husband and gets away with it. But the fun became a nightmare after a Dixie Chicks concert in 2003 in London, where singer Maines told the crowd and the world that she was "ashamed" that President George W. Bush came from her home state of Texas. Some American conservatives claimed that Maines's remarks were equivalent to treason, and the group faced massive boycotts from country fans and Nashville and death threats.
With the release of "Taking the Long Way," their first album since falling from grace in large parts of America, the group has departed from its country roots. But the group is no less angry, and the album's first single, "Not Ready to Make Nice," is a call to arms. In the song, Maines, 31, sings: "I'm still mad as hell and I can't bring myself to do what it is you think I should." Despite modest radio play, the album still topped the US pop charts and in Germany it is in the top five.
In a recent SPIEGEL interview in Cologne, Maines discussed the boycotts, the drama and why she remains one of Bush's most outspoken critics.
read interview
July 08, 2006 Edition 1
Karyn Maughan
The giant ice ball that fell from the Douglasdale sky has put the suburb on the meteorological map.
Research conducted by a Nasa- affiliated scientist suggests that the frozen object that plummeted from the clear sky last Friday morning was one of the first "megacryometeors" to be recorded in Africa.
And Professor Jesus Martinez-Frias, head of the Planetary Geology Laboratory at the Centro de Astrobiología in Madrid, has warned that the microwave oven-sized ice object could be a portent of "serious environmental problems".
Frias is an authority in the megacryometeor phenomenon, having written a number of research papers on possible reasons for its development. According to his research, falling ice balls have been recorded since the 19th century.
And, six years ago, a plague of falling ice balls caused extensive damage to cars and an industrial storage facility in the Iberian Peninsula.
Fortunately, Africa's first recorded ice ball was far less destructive, melting almost immediately after it shattered on its pavement landing area.
Frias agreed with security guard Sizwe Sofika, who witnessed the frozen object plummet from the sky, that the ice ball was not frozen human waste ejected from a plane.
Sofika and guard S'Wester Moya were sitting in a security booth outside the Fontana de la Vita complex when they saw a white object plunge from the sky.
The impact of the ice ball's fall created a small crater on the pavement, which was covered with pieces of broken ice.
"Megacryometeors are not the classical big hailstones, ice from aircraft (waste water or tank leakage), nor the simple result of icing processes at high altitudes," Frias said.
"The term 'megacryometeor' was recently coined to name large atmospheric ice conglomerations, which, despite sharing many textural, hydrochemical and isotopic features detected in large hailstones, are formed under clear-sky conditions," he said.
July 3, 2006
Rodrigue Tremblay
The New American Empire
"We now live in a nation in which the president has the omnipotent power to ignore all constitutional restraints on his power."
Jacob Hornberger ( Future of Freedom Foundation)
"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,"
Vice President Dick Cheney, August 26, 2002
"The defense policy of the United States is based on a simple premise: The United States does not start fights. We will never be an aggressor."
President Ronald Reagan
George W. Bush has failed as president. Indeed, it looks like the political legacy that George W. Bush will leave behind will be a terrible heritage. His administration, (which should more appropriately be called 'the Bush-Cheney administration' because of the predominant and crucial role played by Vice President Dick Cheney) will be remembered as an administration built on lies, fabricated "evidence", duplicity, deception, manipulation, propaganda, improvisation, bad policies and gratuitous warmongering. In other words, the 'Bush-Cheney administration' is the reverse of what you would like a democratic government to be. The end result is an administration that has profoundly corrupted the daily working of the U. S. government.
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By RYAN LENZ, Associated Press Writer Sat Jul 1, 3:00 PM ET
BEIJI, Iraq - Investigators believe American soldiers spent nearly a week plotting an attack in which they raped an Iraqi woman, then killed her and her family in an insurgent-ridden area south of Baghdad, a U.S. military official said Saturday.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing, said the attack appeared "totally premeditated" and that the soldiers apparently "studied" the family for about a week before carrying out the attack.
According to the official, the Sunni Arab family had just moved into a new home in the religiously mixed area about 20 miles south of Baghdad. The Americans entered the home, separated three family members from the woman, then raped her and set fire to her body, the official said. The three others were also slain. A senior Army official who also requested anonymity because the investigation is ongoing said one of the victims was a child .
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