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Palestinian children routinely jailed for throwing stones, report finds
contribution by Libby Powell
In an Israeli military detention centre in January 2011, an interrogator addressed a boy. Blindfolded and bound, 16-year-old Malek would later remember the words: “My name’s Abu Ahmad and I’ll give you five minutes to think and then confess to throwing stones.”
In the West Bank, stones are everywhere.
They litter the pale, rocky slopes on which Palestinian villages and Israeli settlements perch, side by side. Children, too, are everywhere. They make up over half of Palestine’s population and suffer the same realities and frustrations of conflict as the adults.
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Anders Breivik wasn’t a “lone wolf”, he was part of a movement
Right-wing pundits are now very keen to tell us that the Norwegian terror attacks were not caused by right-wing anti-multicultural ideology.
The fact that Anders Breivik quoted Daily Mail articles in his manifesto and forged links with the same anti-immigration groups lauded by our tabloid press is apparently neither here nor there.
He was just a lone nutter okay? And besides, if it wasn’t for multiculturalism, then there wouldn’t have been a problem there in the first place.
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The famine in Somali is no natural disaster
When we see dying Somalis, it is all too easy to see a natural disaster. But droughts are more frequent because oil executives demand the right to carry on exploring and extracting and to keep our society addicted to burning.
Without the level of carbon we have pumped into the atmosphere, we would have neither the frequency nor the scale of droughts we see today.
But the drought is only one factor. It has arrived in the middle of a perfect storm for Somalia, with very high global food prices and very weak government.
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Why the Euro deal on Greece is still likely to fail
The EU thinks it’s saved the Euro, again. It hasn’t.
This is a deal, summarised here, that to coin the current vernacular, kicks the euro down the road until the autumn, but which has no hope of delivering a real solution.
Why not?
Because, clause 1, no one knows if the Greek people will, as yet, put up with the austerity that is demanded of them. But what we can say with certainty is that the austerity demanded will not deliver growth, whatever this document claims.
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Ministers plan to make it harder to get human rights justice in the UK
contribution by Karen Luyckx
In the past few days, 33 Peruvian farmers have received out-of-court settlements for the alleged torture they suffered after protesting against a UK company building a mine on their land.
And in the High Court, a group of elderly Kenyans have been given permission to bring a claim against the government for the abuse and torture they suffered in the 1950s.
It should be a week to celebrate, yet the Government is pressing ahead with legislation which will make it practically impossible for most people in poor countries to seek justice in British courts.
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How Obama could ruin Republicans over the debt ceiling stand-off
In just under two weeks, the United States government could shut down if Congress does not pass emergency legislation to raise the ‘debt ceiling’. To explain: the US has always had an upper limit on how much outstanding debt the government can accumulate, by law.
That figure is currently around $14 trillion and needs to be raised by 2nd August or the US govt shuts down and financial markets go into a tail-spin. This has happened before, during Bill Clinton’s Presidency.
Rather cleverly, President Obama has created a trap for Republicans and they seem to be falling straight into it. At this point, believe it or not, if the US economy shuts down – Obama benefits.
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The full extent of US drone attacks in Pakistan revealed
contribution by Jamie Thunder
On June 29 this year John Brennan, President Obama’s chief counter-terrorism advisor, said in a speech at John Hopkins University that there ‘hasn’t been a single collateral death’ in the past year from the USA’s use of unmanned drones in Pakistan.
This echoed earlier assurances from unnamed US and Pakistani officials, who claimed some militants had been allowed to escape rather than risk civilians being killed.
But research by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism published yesterday shows that claims no civilians have been killed are wrong.
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Time to really start worrying – the Euro crisis is getting worse
I might be premature (always the risk when commenting on markets) but – it looks to me like the Eurozone Bank Stress tests have utterly failed.
They are only two reasons for doing these tests – either the aim is to genuinely test if the banks are healthy enough to take possible losses and identify which banks require more capital OR the aim is simply to reassure the markets that the banks are fine.
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Is Ronald Reagan respected on these shores?
Spitting Image – a widely-watched satirical television show of the 1980s – famously suggested that Ronald Reagan fancied Margaret Thatcher something rotten. ‘What a fine lookin’ woman,’ the punch line to one particularly celebrated latex puppet sketch ran. ‘Pity I’m only screwing her country.’
Despite the juvenile invocation of sexist witticism beneath even the dignity of the average smutty schoolboy, the gag was widely repeated, precisely because it did seem to encapsulate the state of the special relationship. Not for nothing, either, did Labour politician Denis Healey’s jibe that Thatcher was ‘Reagan’s poodle’ score a direct hit.
Today a statute of the former president has been unveiled in his honour in London. So it’s worth recalling that Reagan was not a widely popular figure on this side of the Atlantic during his term in office.
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Oxfam’s reply to critics: Feeding the world isn’t easy
contribution by Duncan Green
When you launch a big campaign like GROW, you generally get both good reviews and a few attacks, and since the advent of the blogosphere, those attacks have got more virulent.
This time around, we must be doing something wrong, because the handful of diatribes I’ve seen (do tell me if I’ve missed some) are actually disappointingly thin. But in case you’re interested, here are a few reflections and responses.
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Isn’t it time to re-think our (lack of) strategy in Libya?
I’ve been putting off revisiting the points I made before we started bombing Libya, for two reasons – first, the situation there is so murky and indecipherable that it’s difficult to assess, and second… Well, I don’t feel very good about saying some of this stuff while people are fighting and dying for their families and homes.
Nonetheless, I think it’s worth looking at this again.
Recall the atmosphere at the time, which was thick with the implication that opposition to a fresh bombing campaign was a ridiculous, childish concept, far outside the boundaries of political acceptability, and quite possibly tantamount to de facto support for Gaddafi’s goons.
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The 1981 Irish Hunger Strike: 30 years on
contribution by Sean Oliver
The victory of Sinn Fein’s Paul Maskey in the West Belfast by-election was such a foregone conclusion it barely made the news. Mr Maskey pledged to continue the `proud and strong legacy’ of predecessor Gerry Adams.
This vote marks the latest success for Sinn Fein’s electoral strategy, and a legacy of an earlier watershed moment of recent Irish history — the 1981 hunger strike which took place thirty years ago. Indeed, it is an astonishing contrast – the then seemingly intractable and bloody with the power sharing arrangements and forward moving political process today.
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Why is the Guardian’s Simon Tisdall defending Bashir again?
contribution by Tim Flatman
Earlier this year the Guardian became the first mainstream UK newspaper in recent memory to carry a front-page interview with an ICC-indicted war-criminal, describing him as a “maverick” who “polarised opinion”.
It implied state-sponsored abuses in Darfur were a thing of the past, contrary to many reports over the last 12 months of numerous rape and camps being bombed.
Now its columnist Simon Tisdall is trying to justify the Government of Sudan’s invasion of Abyei.
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Support for Palestinian voices on campus are now called ‘extremism’
Over the last decade, Palestine solidarity activism on campus has grown in size and impact, perhaps exemplified by the wave of occupations in 2009 protesting the Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip.
In response, there has been pushback, in the name of combating ‘hate speech’ and antisemitism, led by the Union of Jewish Students (UJS).
One of the main tools UJS has been using is a draft “working definition” of antisemitism produced in 2005 by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC, now the FRA). This has been adopted by the NUS and pushed on a number of individual campuses.
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As European politics fractures further, where do we stand?
An excellent piece in the FT today by Peter Spiegel today argues that tensions over the Euro and immigration could see an unravelling of the European project. But maybe the most interesting part of the article is the final lines, worth quoting at length.
We may be witnessing a generational change in European political dynamics. Traditional left-right divisions have narrowed. No mainstream social democrat now advocates centralised economic planning, just as no conservative candidate seriously questions the underpinning of the welfare state.
Isn’t it time for a referendum on Europe?
contribution by Mark Seddon
The mere mention of the words ‘Europe’ or ‘European Union’ is almost bound to make eyes glaze over. The last time that people were actually asked to register an opinion as to whether Britain was better off in or out of this political, social and economic union was back in 1975.
They would like us all to believe that any new referendum that gave this generation a chance to pass judgement on the European project would be an exercise in vulgar, dangerous populism.
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How the Arab Spring is going to turn nasty
contribution by David Malone
A recent article on ZeroHedge is all outraged that at the news that the US government is going to act as guarantor for a 1 billion eurodollar bond issuance by Egypt. They ask why the US is:
…backstopping paper by another government, which will soon be very much insolvent…
The answer in a UPI article on May 18th is simple – the price of Wheat. Just as it was for why we had the uprisings in the first place.
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Why there could be civil war in Sudan again
contribution by Tim Flatman
Over the weekend, Sudanese Armed Forces took control of Abyei town on the borders of North & South Sudan, after two days of aerial bombardment and ground fighting in surrounding areas.
President Bashir dissolved Abyei administration in a congratulatory broadcast. Tens of thousands of Southern civilians were successfully evacuated in the morning, with no adequate shelter or food. The number of civilians killed or injured in the attacks is unknown.
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Why is the UK failing Bahrain’s people?
contribution by Peter Tatchell
The international community has failed in its duty to protect the civilian population of Bahrain from arrest, detention without trial, torture and murder by the regime of King Hamad ibn Isa Al Khalifa.
Close to 1,000 Bahrainis have been arrested since the start of protests in February, although about 300 of these have since been released. Twenty-one opposition activists and human rights defenders are being prosecuted on trumped up charges.
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Will the Foreign Aid commitment be another Cameron u-turn?
contribution by Owen Tudor
I’ve expressed scepticism before about the Government’s commitment to meet the UN target for overseas aid by 2013.
With the news that Defence Secretary Liam Fox has raised concerns about the pledge suggests that we are seeing the beginning of the end for that commitment.
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You can read articles through the front page, via Twitter or RSS feed.
» How the UK could pay for its demographic “time-bomb”
» Osborne’s time is running out, even amongst friends
» BBC goes along with govt spoiling tactic on disabled people
» The ‘madness’ of terrorism and other offensive terms
» Palestinian children routinely jailed for throwing stones, report finds
» What are people like Melanie Phillips calling for then?
» Anders Breivik wasn’t a “lone wolf”, he was part of a movement
» The famine in Somali is no natural disaster
» Will tomorrow be the day people start to question Osborne’s competence?
» The inequality rarely mentioned in Westminster: Scotland’s land
» How child-beating teachers were STOPPed 25 years ago
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