Friday, Feb 27th
Last update09:27:09 AM GMT
“You have a policy of ethnic cleansing in vast areas of the West Bank....It’s very open,” she said.
Hass is a reporter and columnist for the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz. She says she is the only Israeli Jewish journalist living and working in the Palestinian territories. Now based in the city of Ramallah, she has lived in the West Bank since 1997 and in Gaza for four years before that. She is giving a lecture on Israel-Palestine relations at the University of B.C. Wednesday.
Complaints of harassment and hostile work environments are on the rise on Capitol Hill, where offices aren’t required to keep personnel records, provide mandatory anti-discrimination training or protect whistleblowers despite forcing other government agencies and private employers to do so, according to a new report.
A majority of the counseling requests came from employees of the Architect of the Capitol and U.S. Capitol Police, with just 19 percent of requests prompted by House staffers and four percent from Senate employees.
Eventually every cast member of Sesame Street sang, “One of these things is not like the others, one of these things just doesn't belong …” And for the last month or so it’s been my theme song too.
The myriad differences between The United States and Canada, most small, some huge, culminate in an odd sort of “culture shock” that resonates throughout the day. And with each noted difference … a mini-Twilight Zone episode.
While the president of the Palestinian Authority speaks at the United Nations, reporting to government leaders and ambassadors about Palestinian preparedness for an independent state, Yehuda Etzion is working on his own plan for the region.
Etzion, a resident of the settlement Ofra, has a draft master plan for Jerusalem, which he is preparing with a team of Ofra residents and an architectural firm. The plan centers around the Third Temple: where a ring road will pass, where pilgrims will park, where observation points will be located. The Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem will be demolished. They are not part of the plan.
In a stunning conflict of interest, public hearings on federal approval for a proposed tar sands pipeline are being run by a contractor for the pipeline company itself. The U.S. Department of State’s public hearings along the proposed route of the TransCanada Keystone XL tar sands pipeline this week are under the purview of Cardno Entrix, a “professional environmental consulting company” that specializes in “permitting and compliance.”
Cardno is not only running the State Department hearings, but also manages the department’s Keystone XL website and drafted the department’s environmental impact statement. Comments from the public about the pipeline go not to the government, but to a cardno.com email.
Much of the focus on hydraulic fracturing (or fracking) for natural gas pertains to potential effects of this technology on water resources, as I discussed in an earlier blog entry.
Yet, the process of fracking, oil and gas production, natural gas processing, natural gas transmission, and natural gas distribution also releases a variety of potentially harmful gases into the atmosphere.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is permitted to include people on the government’s terrorist watch list even if they have been acquitted of terrorism-related offenses or the charges are dropped, according to newly released documents.
The files, released by the F.B.I. under the Freedom of Information Act, disclose how the police are instructed to react if they encounter a person on the list. They lay out, for the first time in public view, the legal standard that national security officials must meet in order to add a name to the list. And they shed new light on how names are vetted for possible removal from the list.
With each new change Facebook makes, users' privacy becomes a little less ... nonexistent, if you will. The most recent "News Feed" modifications, for example, display everything you say and do on the site to all of your "friends," and even to the public. And now, even after logging out of Facebook, permanent "cookies" track all your movements on websites that contain Facebook buttons or widgets.
The United States secretly sought Japan's support in 1972 to enable it to dump decommissioned nuclear reactors into the world's oceans under the London Convention, an international treaty being drawn up at the time.
Countries working on the wording of the pact wanted to specifically prohibit the dumping of radioactive waste at sea.
But Washington wanted to incorporate an exceptional clause in the case of decommissioned nuclear reactors.
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