The Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) — a right-wing “pro-Israel” pressure group — attempted to paint the Occupy Wall Street protests as anti-Semitic. But while plenty of evidence runs counter to the ECI’s far-reaching assertions that politicians are “turning a blind eye to anti-semitic, anti-Israel attacks,” the ECI is much slower to condemn its own ties to ethnic and religious intolerance.
ECI board member Rachel Abrams — wife of George W. Bush administration Middle East adviser Elliott Abrams — litters her blog, “Bad Rachel,” with homophobic, anti-Palestinian, innuendo-filled screeds about political opponents.
Emergency Committee For Israel Board Member Calls Palestinians ‘Savages,’ ‘Unmanned Animals,’ ‘Food For Sharks’
Centuries of open justice in UK threatened by secret courts after lobbying by CIA
Secret justice looks set to be a regular feature of British courts and tribunals when the intelligence services want to protect their sources of information. Civil courts, immigration panels and even coroner's inquests would go into secret session if the Government rules that hearing evidence in public could be a threat to national security.
The proposals, which run counter to a centuries-old British tradition of open justice, were introduced to a sparsely attended House of Commons yesterday by the Justice Secretary, Ken Clarke – and met almost no opposition. The planned changes to the British justice system follow lobbying of the Government by the CIA.
Arms trade to repressive regimes largely from US, Russia and Europe
Amnesty International, in an assessment of arms transfers, referred to a "stark failure" of arms exports controls across the board. The rights group said that, before the Arab Spring, the United States, Russian and several European countries supplied huge quantities of weapons to repressive regimes in the region.
Citi will pay $285 million to settle mortgage fraud charges
Citigroup has agreed to pay $285 million to settle civil fraud charges that it misled buyers of complex mortgage investments just as the housing market was starting to collapse.
The Securities and Exchange Commission said Wednesday that the big Wall Street bank bet against the deal in 2007 and made $160 million in fees and profits. Investors lost millions. Citigroup neither admitted nor denied the SEC's allegations in the settlement.
US health care falls farther behind peers, report finds
The U.S. health care system is lagging further and further behind other industrialized countries on major measures of quality, efficiency and access to care, according to a new report from the nonprofit Commonwealth Fund, a leading health policy foundation.
That is having a profound effect on overall health in the U.S., the report found.
The politics behind the Shalit prisoner swap
Like so many other diplomatic and political initiatives in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the recent announcement of a new prisoner release is based on the same solution that has been proposed dozens of times before - only to collapse because the time, and often Israeli political will, wasn't right.
In this case, the separate announcements made by Hamas leader Khaled Meshal and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, asserted that Hamas would release Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, captured by Hamas in 2006, while Israel would release 1,027 Palestinian prisoners, some of whom have been in jail for decades.
Goldman had a lousy third quarter, but execs will still take home billions in bonuses.
Today’s Goldman Sachs earning reports provides a valuable lesson on how things really work inside Wall Street’s largest investment houses. Goldman Sachs had an awful three months, losing $428 million in the third quarter of 2011, and yet it continued to shovel billions into the bonus pool it will share with its employees at year’s end.
Through the first nine months of 2011, Goldman set aside $10 billion in its compensation fund. If Goldman’s 30,000 employees split that bounty evenly, that would work out to $333,000 per person—plus the billions more Goldman will no doubt set aside in the last few months of the year.
Malaria vaccine could save hundreds of thousands
The pan-African trial in 6,000 children aged five to 17 months found the vaccine reduced the numbers infected with the most serious form of malaria by 56 per cent, in the 12 months after vaccination, compared to those who did not receive the jab.
It also reduced the number of severe malaria cases by 47 per cent. As little as a decade ago vaccine experts considered the challenge of tackling the mosquito-borne infection impossible.
Anwar al-Awlaki’s family speaks out against his son’s death in airstrike
“To kill a teenager is just unbelievable, really, and they claim that he is an al-Qaeda militant. It’s nonsense,” said Nasser al-Awlaki, a former Yemeni agriculture minister who was Anwar al-Awlaki’s father and the boy’s grandfather, speaking in a phone interview from Sanaa on Monday. “They want to justify his killing, that’s all.”
The teenager, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who was born in Denver in 1995, and his 17-year-old Yemeni cousin were killed in a U.S. military strike that left nine people dead in southeastern Yemen.
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