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Thursday, September 11, 2008 |
Peace: European countries are systematically defrauded by Israel.
The Dutch Peace organisation has lodged a complaint with the FIOD, the Dutch Fiscal Information and Investigation Service, for fraud committed with Israeli imports in Europe. The Israelis are exporting produce illegally grown in the occupied territories. These products don't mention their origin or are labelled as being produce from other countries.
This is illegal according to international law and in violation of EU trade agreements.
Redress: "The Israeli military occupation spares no efforts or time to forcibly and illegally confiscate Palestinian privately and publicly owned land as evident by the numerous UN and international bodies' reports. Whilst encouraging, protecting and providing economic incentives for illegal settlers in the occupied territory to steal and farm Palestinian land, the Israeli authorities have been applying unjust policies aiming at strangulating Palestinian economic activities, particularly the agricultural sector. Among other policies, the confiscation of land; the building of the Wall; creeping annexation and expansion of settlements; construction of hundreds of bypass roads for Israeli settlers only; denying access to natural resources, particularly water; movement restrictions; and siege - all these meant that the Palestinian economy is near collapse and the Palestinian people are being imprisoned in an ever shrinking bantustans."
BT: "Food grown on illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied territories is being sold in Britain, often to customers who assume they are buying goods from Palestinian-owned farms.
Tesco, Sainsbury's, Waitrose and Somerfield - the leading supermarket chains - have all admitted sourcing produce from Israeli-owned farms on Palestinian territory but claimed that labelling the goods 'origin: West Bank' gave enough information for the customer to make an informed choice.
All the leading supermarkets claim they are complying with European Union law, which states that the origin of a product on a food label can be given as a geographical region rather than a country - providing the meaning is clear to the consumer. Campaigners say customers are being duped into believing they are buying goods from Palestinian-owned farms, when in reality they are contributing to the economies of the illegal settlements."
GlobalBSD: "New call to shoppers to stop buying Israeli goods, especially from illegal Israeli settlements, and to supermarkets to stop stocking such goods."
12:37:06 PM 
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RIAN: "The U.S. Air Force will patrol the airspace over the Baltic states from October, the Latvian Defense Ministry said on Wednesday.
A group of U.S. F-16 fighter jets will replace the current German planes on a rotation basis."
It's like the Russian Air Force patrolling airspace over Cuba.
FT: "Strains in the transatlantic relationship were on display in Rome yesterday as Dick Cheney, the US vicepresident, and Mr Berlusconi read out statements.
Mr Cheney strongly condemned Russia's 'unilateral efforts to alter by force of arms Georgia's internationally recognised boundaries', and reiterated that Nato had agreed on eventual membership for Georgia and Ukraine.
The US delegation, in Italy for five days, had pushed for clear endorsement from Mr Berlusconi. Instead, he did not utter a word of criticism against Russia. The Italian premier said he had tried to explain to Mr Cheney his personal success in helping to defuse 'what happened in Ossetia and then in Georgia'. He stressed the importance of sustaining the Nato-Russia council, the joint forum he inaugurated in 2002 with President George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin, then Russia's president.
According to European diplomats, Bush administration hawks view with suspicion Mr Berlusconi's close personal ties to the Russian leader and worry about Italy's presidency of the G8 from January. Italy has already made clear it intends to invite Mr Putin to the summit in Sardinia.
An attempt by Italy to call a routine meeting of the Nato-Russia council after the invasion of Georgia was blocked by the US."
It looks like Mr Cheney will soon want regime change in Italy.
Reuters: "Authorities in the breakaway Georgian region of South Ossetia said on Tuesday they had located the remains of 500 of the 1,600 people they say died during Georgia's August 7/8 bombardment and invasion.
'Preliminary information received by the investigation team by questioning neighbors and relatives showed that over 1,600 people died in South Ossetia as a result of the invasion by the Georgian army,' South Ossetia's Prosecutor-General, Taimuraz Khugayev, told Interfax news agency."
Of course, Cheney doesn't care about a few thousand murders, especially not when committed by his own friends. Cheney is a war criminal and should be tried for genocide. Europe knows very well that the interests of the US are running counter to those of Europe. America will have to put up with it or else get another enemy.
11:40:02 AM
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EUObserver: "The European Court of Justice needs to be stopped from undermining national jurisdiction, former German President Roman Herzog and Lüder Gerken, the director of the Centre for European Policy, have warned in a comment published by the EUobserver.
The sharp words come in the wake of similar arguments coming from Denmark and Austria accusing the court of stepping beyond its bounds.
Several cases analysed by Mr Herzog prove, in his view, that the European Court of Justice 'systematically ignores fundamental principles of the Western interpretation of law', that it 'ignores the will of the legislator, or even turns it into its opposite' and 'invents legal principles serving as grounds for later judgements'."
11:28:11 AM
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AfterDowningStreet: "U.S. Senator Russ Feingold, Chairman of the Constitution Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, will hold a hearing on Tuesday, September 16, on 'Restoring the Rule of Law'.
During the hearing, the Subcommittee will hear testimony from legal and historical experts on what steps the next president and the next Congress must take to repair the damage done by the Bush Administration to the rule of law. The hearing is an effort to provide the next president with a full range of recommendations for reestablishing appropriate checks and balances in a variety of areas, including warrantless wiretapping, interrogation standards, detention policy, abuse of executive privilege, excessive government secrecy, violations of privacy and misleading Congress."
New book coming up: In Debt We Trust.
Change is in the air:
Guardian: "Although Brown has all but ruled out a windfall tax on energy companies, it turns out that his rightwing Italian counterpart has had no qualms about introducing one of his own. It is known as the Robin Hood tax, and, according to Berlusconi, it's gone down a storm.
'We resorted to this in order to do something about the balance sheets of those companies that have profited from rises in gas and oil prices in particular,' Berlusconi said."
Nader: "When Members of Congress or the Administration or the corporate CEOs or the empirically starved right-wing ideologues start whining about regulation the right-wing echo chamber goes wild. When the absence of adequate regulation lets an industry wreak havoc, Congress and the Administration meekly admit a bit of regulation might have averted disaster. The corporate CEOs, expelled with their lucrative golden parachutes, have 'no comment'.
The taxpayers, who are too often the guarantors of last resort and who are stuck with the tab, are asking each other why their public watchdogs were asleep at the switch. The Washington merry-go-round is something to behold.
As the recent headlines note, the Federal Government has taken over the giant companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) is using the legal process of a 'conservatorship' to 'stabilize' Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Talk about regulation!
We and others have been telling members of Congress, government regulators and members of the media about the structural and operational problems of Fannie and Freddie for years.
In 1991, lawyer Tom Stanton, a former colleague, warned about the risks and non-regulation of Fannie and Freddie in his prophetic book - A State of Risk (Harper Business).
In May of 1998, we even held a conference dedicated to Fannie and Freddie."
Profits are privatized and losses are socialized. That's capitalism.
By the way, you did know that Nader is again running for president, did you?
11:13:49 AM
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© Copyright 2008.
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