Wednesday, Nov 26th
Last update07:57:04 AM GMT
International Glance
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.
An Emirati court on Sunday acquitted Shiekh Issa despite a video tape of the 2004 incident showing him torturing an Afghan man with whips, electric cattle prods and wooden planks with protruding nails.
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.
“To preserve the balance we must develop offensive weapons systems, not missile defence systems as the United States is doing,” he said during a visit to the naval port of Vladivostok on the Pacific coast.
TVNL Comment: Said to the delight of the people who instigated this during the Bush years. These are the people who made LOTS of money on cold war spending.
Vanunu was convicted by an Israeli court in 1986 after being kidnapped from Italy by Israeli intelligence agents. He was sentenced to 18 years for passing on information about Israel's clandestine nuclear program.
Vanunu, who at the time worked as a technician at Israel's nuclear research facility, passed information along to a British newspaper and led nuclear arms analysts to conclude that Israel possessed a stockpile of nuclear weapons.
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