Geuzenverzet: "The Geuzen Medal 2009 is awarded to Al-Haq, the Palestinian Human Rights Organization Al-Haq, and B'Tselem, the Israëli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. The Geuzen Medal will be presented on Friday 13 March in the City of Vlaardingen in the Netherlands."
B'Tselem: "Tomorrow, the human rights organizations B'Tselem and al-Haq will receive the prestigious Dutch 'Geuzen Resistance 1940-1945' award at a ceremony in Vlaardingen, Holland. The prize, first given in 1987, is awarded to persons or institutions dedicated to advancing democracy and opposing tyranny, discrimination, and racism.
Shawan Jabarin, executive director of the Palestinian organization al-Haq, is banned from leaving the West Bank and will not be able to accept the award on behalf of his organization. B'Tselem strongly protested Israel's denial of Jabarin's freedom of movement. B'Tselem's executive director, Jessica Montell, who will receive the prize on behalf of B'Tselem, said that, 'The satisfaction B'Tselem feels for the recognition given the organization for its work, reflected in the award of this important prize, will not be complete until al-Haq, our partner in the struggle to realize universal human rights principles, is prohibited from sharing this occasion with us.'"
2:38:11 PM
MinnPost: "At a 'Great Conversations' event at the University of Minnesota last night, legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh may have made a little more news than he intended by talking about new alleged instances of domestic spying by the CIA, and about an ongoing covert military operation that he called an 'executive assassination ring'.
'Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command - JSOC it's called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him.
'Congress has no oversight of it. It's an executive assassination ring essentially, and it's been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.
'Under President Bush's authority, they've been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That's been going on, in the name of all of us."
In most cases, we can expect that other people were blamed for these murders. Just a guess who they murdered: Litvinenko, Politkovskaya, the political assassinations in Lebanon?
In the meantime, Apple is removing words like 'farting' from their discussion forums.
Macmegasite: "Apple has rejected Tweetie's 1.3 update because an offensive word appeared in Twitter's trends. In that case, they should pull all Twitter clients and all web browsers, since they can all potentially show the same offensive content."
We do live in a Kafkaesque world, don't we.
10:35:12 AM
NotMyTribe: "On March 2, 2009, the Israeli advocacy group Peace Now issued a report saying that the Israeli housing ministry plans to build 73,000 housing units in the West Bank. Peace Now said 15,000 of these units had already been approved, with another 58,000 awaiting approval."
SOTT: "At Tuwani, West Bank - 'I couldn't run. My pregnancy was too far advanced, and there was nowhere to hide,' said Amna Salman Rabaye, 31, as she recalled the terrifying incident several months ago.
Rabaye from the Palestinian Bedouin village of At Tuwani in the southern West Bank was grazing her sheep when she was assaulted by a security guard from the adjacent illegal Israeli settlement of Ma'on.
At Tuwani was established over 300 years ago by nomadic tribes of Bedouin who first moved into the area seeking shelter in the nearby caves. However, Israeli settlers built the adjacent Ma'on settlement in 1982. The nearby illegal outpost of Havot Ma'on was built at a later date.
The settlements, however, which are legal under Israeli law can number from several hundred residents to small towns with thousands of inhabitants, and all the associated infrastructure.
There are nearly 300,000 Israeli settlers living in the West Bank and nearly 200,000 in East Jerusalem, according to the Israeli information center for human rights, B'Tselem.
Under international law, including various UN Security Council resolutions, the settlements are built illegally on Palestinian land.
The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying power from transferring citizens from its own territory to the occupied territory (Article 49). The Hague Regulations prohibit an occupying power from undertaking permanent changes in the occupied area unless these are due to military needs in the narrow sense of the term, or unless they are undertaken for the benefit of the local population.
Nevertheless, Israeli settlement-building on the West Bank has accelerated at an unprecedented rate in the last few years."
Guardian: "A confidential EU report accuses the Israeli government of using settlement expansion, house demolitions, discriminatory housing policies and the West Bank barrier as a way of 'actively pursuing the illegal annexation' of East Jerusalem."
Jews stole the land from the Palestinians and created the Israeli state by means of terror. Ethnic cleansing is an accepted principle in Israel.
JPost: "A stash of weapons dating back to the 1948 War of Independence was uncovered at a synagogue in Magdiel, Hod Hasharon on Thursday. Police said the weapons were found hidden on the second floor inside a wooden crate, when workers were cleaning out the area.
The synagogue was used as a headquarters by the Haganah during the months preceding the declaration of statehood.
The discovery come just over a week after a similar find at a kibbutz in the western Negev. At the end of January, a weapons cache was found at Kibbutz Nirim.
According to reports, the cache contained rifles, mortar shells, and explosive materials which were used to defend the kibbutz during the War of Independence."
10:22:28 AM
