Friday, Jul 19th
Last update05:01:52 AM GMT
International Glance
After having served 18 years for leaking Israeli nuclear secrets, Mordechai Vanunu begins serving additional 3 months for violating terms of his parole.
He warned that the Shin Bet security service "controls the prisons" and that they will try to torture him psychologically, the same way they did the last time he was incarcerated.
“WE CAN KILL ANYONE, ANYWHERE FOR ANY REASON…ARE YOU LISTENING PRESIDENT OBAMA”
Israel itself is a massive arms supplier and developer of security technologies. They control most of the world’s airports, you know, the ones where terrorists on the “no fly lists” move freely from country to country with impunity. A major industry in Israel has been to develop advanced technologies to prevent exactly the problems that happen under their noses every day. Who runs these companies? The massive defense industries in Israel, industries tied to arming South Africa during sanctions for apartheid, even helping South Africa develop nuclear weapons and now peddling German built submarines to North Korea are run by members of the Mossad and IDF. This is allowed by Israeli law.
Left-wing American linguist Professor Noam Chomsky was denied entry into Israel on Sunday, for reasons that were not immediately clear.
Chomsky, who was scheduled to deliver a lecture at Bir Zeit University near Jerusalem, told the Right to Enter activist group by telephone that inspectors had stamped the words "denied entry" onto his passport when he tried to cross from Jordan over Allenby Bridge.
Less than 24 hours after Israeli and Palestinian leaders relaunched indirect peace talks, Israel on Monday announced its intention to expand Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem, a step that Palestinians warned could torpedo the process.
Almost three in four Palestinian children living in East Jerusalem are classified as poor and the city is still the poorest in Israel, figures released by a human rights group and the Central Bureau of Statistics show.
The figures were compiled, separately, ahead of Jerusalem Day - which begins tonight and marks 43 years since the establishment of Israeli control over East Jerusalem in 1967.
As Israeli-Palestinian negotiations restart, Palestinians are determined to begin by tackling the issue of borders, before working backwards toward deciding how to implement the establishment of a Palestinian state. Once agreement is reached on borders, the thinking goes, it will become clear who has the right to decide whether or not settlement activity can continue.
Naturally all this talk must have a reference point. While exact borders are a matter for negotiation, it is hard to begin talks if one side insists on anticipating a fixed outcome. Yet the most recent maps published by the governemt unilaterally annex Palestine to Israel while ignoring the existence of many Palestinian communities.
Israel has no plan to review its nuclear policies, a government official said on Friday, playing down efforts by world powers at a U.N. non-proliferation conference to promote a Middle East free of atomic arms.
Hoping to win Arab backing for sanctions against Iran, the United States and other permanent U.N. Security Council members on Wednesday called for ways to be found to implement a 1995 initiative that would guarantee nuclear disarmament in a region where Israel is widely assumed to have the only such weapons.
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