International Glance
Israel's prime minister declared on Sunday that his country would retain parts of the West Bank forever — a statement that infuriated Palestinians and could complicate the year-old peace mission of a visiting U.S. envoy.
"Our message is clear: We are planting here, we will stay here, we will build here, this place will be an inseparable part of the state of Israel for eternity," Netanyahu proclaimed at a tree-planting ceremony celebrating the Jewish arbor day at a settlement just south of Jerusalem.
Ken Taylor, the Canadian diplomat celebrated 30 years ago for hiding U.S. embassy personnel during the Iranian revolution, actively spied for the Americans and helped them plan an armed incursion into the country.
I had the pleasure of speaking at the recent Palestine memorial week in London. It was on the first anniversary of that evil attack on Gaza during "Operation Cast Lead" in 2008/9. What I found incredible after my presentation was the total lack of knowledge and understanding of some of the main issues concerning Gaza and West Bank.
There are only two US media outlets that have reported on Cuba's response to the deadly 7.0 earthquake that hit Haiti. One was Fox News, which claimed, wrongly, that the Cubans were absent from the list of neighboring Caribbean countries providing aid. The other was the Christian Science Monitor (a respected news organization that recently shut down its print edition), which reported correctly that Cuba had dispatched 30 doctors to the stricken nation.
The psychiatric specialists might be so kind as to try to explain how a country with leaders committed to a two-state solution continues to direct huge budgets toward building more settlements in territories it intends to vacate in the future. What explanation could there be, if not from the psychiatric realm, for a 10-month halt to residential construction in the settlements, to be immediately followed by more construction? How can a country be so tightfisted when it comes to healthcare spending on its citizens, whose poor are getting poorer - and yet when a portion of the roads in the West Bank are already deemed as dangerous, they build more and more roads there leading from nowhere to nowhere?
Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al-Nahayan, the brother of UAE president and Abu Dhabi emir Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahayan, has been acquitted of charges of torture, his lawyer has said.
Russia needs more weapons to punch through America’s new missile defence shield, Vladimir Putin said yesterday in blunt remarks that will complicate efforts to cut the nuclear arsenals of the former Cold War rivals.
