When the freeze was announced, it came with the assertion that some 3,000 units were grandfathered in and would proceed during the moratorium.
David Ha’Ivri, spokesman for the Shomron Regional Council in the northern West Bank, said the leader of the council, Gershon Mesika, knew a freeze was coming and so approved more than 1,600 units in 2009, nearly 10 times the number that had been approved the previous year for his area.




Former Guantanamo detainees can proceed with lawsuits accusing Britain of complicity in torture overseas, a High Court judge ruled Wednesday, rejecting a government request to suspend the action.
Serviceman Bradley Manning, 22, faces two charges related to the illegal transfer and transmission of classified information from a US military network. The US said he was suspected of downloading from SIPR Net.
A group of journalists has announced that it plans to sue Israel over its deadly raid on a flotilla of aid ships bound for the Gaza Strip in May. Lawyers have already begun preparing lawsuits in several European countries, according to several of the journalists, who met in Istanbul on Wednesday.
The Israeli Navy reportedly blockades a Libyan-chartered aid vessel which has set sail for the blockaded Gaza Strip, issuing threats against the convoy.
THE Iraq war dossier was filled with “lies” about dictator Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the Chilcot inquiry heard yesterday.
The Palestinians of Gaza, most of them descended from refugees of the 1948 war that created Israel, have lived through decades of conflict and confrontation. Their scars have accumulated like layers of sedimentary rock, each marking a different crisis — homelessness, occupation, war, dependency.
In the fall of 1999, the drug giant SmithKline Beecham secretly began a study to find out if its diabetes medicine, Avandia, was safer for the heart than a competing pill, Actos, made by Takeda.
A Yemeni man held at Guantanamo Bay for eight years has been sent home, the Pentagon has said. It comes after a US court ordered the release of Mohammed Odaini, 26, saying he had no connection to al-Qaeda and had been wrongly detained.





























