Friday, Apr 20th
Last update05:20:13 AM GMT
The former U.S. special envoy to the Middle East said Tuesday that President-elect Barack Obama should engage with Hamas under certain conditions, and sooner rather than later.
Retired Gen. Anthony Zinni said if Obama hopes to forge a peace deal, he needs to do it at the beginning of his administration.
Israeli forces killed two girls in an air attack on Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip early Tuesday. Local sources report that a missile destroyed a house belonging to Talal Hamdan in Beit Hanoun today, killing his two daughters of 12 and 4 years old. A son is reported seriously injured. Yesterday Israeli forces killed four sisters and a four year old boy. Over 40 children have been killed since Saturday.
The Department of Homeland Security has sued The Nature Conservancy to condemn land in a South Texas nature preserve for the border fence.
The conservancy's Lennox Foundation Southmost Preserve, which includes more than 1,000 acres along the Rio Grande near Brownsville, is home to a rare grove of native sabal palms, a South Texas native plant nursery for reforestation projects and habitat for the endangered ocelot and jaguarundi.
The government offered the conservancy $114,000 for a strip of land that would leave three-quarters of the preserve, including the property manager's home, in the no-man's land between the fence and Mexico, according to court records filed earlier this month.
The Nature Conservancy's preference is no fence and no compensation, but the offer failed to take into account the impact to the rest of preserve, Laura Huffman, The Nature Conservancy's state director, said Monday.
Activists trying to bring aid to Gaza today claimed their boat had been rammed by Israeli gunboats in a "criminal attack" in international waters.
The Free Gaza Movement said its vessel, the Dignity, was intercepted by several Israeli vessels as it was heading to the Gaza Strip, which has been under Israeli aerial bombardment since Saturday.
One gunboat rammed the Dignity on the port bow side, causing heavy damage, although no one was hurt, the group said.
Every major American city has at least one Holocaust museum or memorial. Worldwide there are more than 250 Holocaust museums and memorials, most of them in the US and Europe. The largest is the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, which is run by a taxpayer-funded federal government agency, and draws some two million visitors yearly.
What’s behind the Holocaust remembrance campaign? Whose interests does it serve?
The Holocaust Remembrance campaign encourages sympathy and support for Jews and Israel. It helps to justify America's massive and on-going support for Israel, and to excuse otherwise inexcusable policies of the Zionist state.
An atheist soldier suing over prayers at military formations claims a larger pattern of religious discrimination exists in the military, citing attempts to convert Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan and an evangelical bias in a suicide prevention manual.
The expanded lawsuit filed Monday by Spc. Dustin Chalker and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation in U.S. District Court in Kansas City also claims the military doesn't take complaints of religious discrimination seriously enough.
The Defense Department has identified fewer than 50 complaints about alleged violations of religious freedoms during the past three years, with 1.4 million personnel in uniform, spokeswoman Eileen Lainez said.
TVNL Comment: To Americans Christianity is the only acceptable cult in the battle of "my imaginary friend is better than your imaginary friend!"
Israel ordered journalists out of areas abutting the Gaza Strip border on Monday, declaring a "closed military zone" there as an offensive in the Hamas-ruled coastal territory entered its third day.
Bush told the world that he wanted to see Peace in the Middle-East before he left office; and now we see exactly what he meant by this bit of Newspeak that is his version of Orwell's "War is Peace."
The fact that Obama will only intensify these kinds of crimes as are being committed by Israel as this is written does not bode well for either Peace or for stability in coming years.
The world isn't just watching the Israeli government commit a crime in Gaza; we are watching it self-harm. This morning, and tomorrow morning, and every morning until this punishment-beating ends, the young people of the Gaza Strip are going to be more filled with hate, and more determined to fight back, with stones or suicide-vests or rockets. Israel's leaders have convinced themselves the harder you beat the Palestinians, the softer they will become. But when this is over, the rage against Israelis will have hardened, and the same old compromises will still be waiting by the roadside of history, untended and unmade.
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