SRI LANKA: Increasing number of crimes in Sri Lanka terrified with another death of woman

October 4, 2011

AHRC, Oct. 4, 2011

AHRC-UAC-190-2011
Ms. Srini Wasana Amaratunga

Urgent Appeal Case : On 25 September body of Ms. Srini Wasana Amaratunga was found at the Elakanda, Wattala in the Gampaha District. Srini had been missing since the morning of the 24th and her relatives made a complaint to the Negombo police. As is customary, the police took no action until her body was found a police team on patrol attached to the Wattala Police Station. This is a one of a series of cases which have occurred in the last several months where women have been abducted and robbed for their jewellery and money. The Asian Human Rights Commission has observed an increased in the daily occurrence of crimes in every part of the country and the law enforcement agencies are doing nothing to carry out their statutory duties. The lethargic approach of these officers and the undue delays in the judiciary have exasperated the situation to the point where the general public live in constant fear. This case is yet another illustration of the exceptional collapse of the rule of law in the country.

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Stephen Lendman: Israeli State Terror Belies Wanting Peace

October 4, 2011
By Stephen Lendman, opednews.com, Oct. 4, 2011

Israel and Washington deplore peace.

In his book “Overcoming Zionism,” Joel Kovel called Israel “a machine for the manufacture of human rights abuses” led by terrorists posing as democrats.

Throughout its history, Israeli policy toward Arabs has been corrosive, destructive, racist, extremist, undemocratic and hateful.

It’s leaders chose violence, not peaceful coexistence; confrontation, not diplomacy; and strength through militarism, intimidation, and naked aggression.

For over 63 years, Palestinians paid the price. They’ve suffered brutally at the hands of “God’s chosen people,” believing Jewish exceptionalism renders Muslim Arabs inferior legitimate enemies and terrorists for wanting to live free in peace on their own land in their own country.

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Age of Ignorance Lingers in Saudi Arabia

October 4, 2011

By Ismail Salami, vetetarnstoday.com, Sept. 29, 2011

In a primitive society where women find themselves in such a farcical situation where they are not even allowed to drive, a simple word like ‘driving’ which is per se devoid of any archetypal undertones has come to carry a meaning far beyond ordinary.

Saudi Arabia has treated women as second-class citizens for decades, denying them many rights including the right to drive. However, the act of driving recently gained symbolic significance when a group of Saudi activists launched an online campaign in June and urged women to start driving on Saudi Arabian roads. Known as the “Women2Drive” campaign, they used Facebook and Twitter to engage in driving as part of their protest against women discrimination in the country.

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Former Israeli minister Tzipi Livni to visit UK after change in arrest law

October 4, 2011

Critics claim change in law governing arrest warrants for war crimes is motivated by political pressure from Israel

Tzipi Livni

Tzipi Livni, now opposition leader in Israel, will meet foreign secretary William Hague in Britain. Photograph: Gali Tibbon/AFP/Getty Images

The former Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, will meet the foreign secretary, William Hague, in Britain on Thursday in the first test of a new law governing arrest warrants for war crimes.

Westminster magistrates court issued an unprecedented arrest warrant for Livni in 2009 – a move that led to an review of the issuing of such warrants.

The warrant, which was issued at the request of lawyers acting for Palestinian victims of Israel‘s operations in Gaza, was withdrawn amid embarrassment in the Foreign Office.

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INDIA: Endgame in Gujarat?

October 4, 2011
By Badri Raina, ZNet, October 04, 2011

“The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power”

Julius Caesar

There comes a time in Macbeth’s  bloody-minded totalitarianism when, wishing to control every little mite of time, space, and freedom of action, he realizes that in so doing he has in fact come to lose all control over everything.

Indeed, the one profound and profoundly enacted truth of Macbeth’s career is to communicate the fearful irony at the heart of all  absolutist ambition, namely, that far from achieving any omnipotent security of selfhood or regime, every successive crime calculated to nail opposition leaves a residue which in course metamorphoses into an uncontrollable  destiny. All moral compass lost, a madly irrational anarchy overtakes the tyrant, until  his only pathetic rationale for going forward or turning back comes to be  which end is physically closer and more accessible: “I am in blood/Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more/Returning were as tedious as go o’er” (Macbeth, Cambridge, ed. John Dover Wilson.)

This seems to be the point at which politics in Gujarat may now have arrived.

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Pravda: USA plots operation against Pakistan

October 3, 2011
Sergei Balmasov, Pravda,  Sept. 30, 2011

USA plots operation against Pakistan. 45507.jpegThe conflict between the U.S. and Pakistan continues to evolve. Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar has provided a tough and undiplomatic answer to the senior US authorities, including her American counterpart, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who accused Islamabad of “pandering to terrorists” from the “Taliban.” The head of Pakistan’s foreign ministry, in fact, accused the U.S. intelligence agencies of committing a series of terrorist attacks against U.S. facilities in Afghanistan to write it off to Pakistan.

Earlier, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, U.S. Admiral Mike Mullen, at a hearing in the Senate criticized Islamabad, accusing it of supporting Pakistan’s “Haqqani” (ISI) that allegedly could have ordered the militants to attack the U.S. embassy in Kabul on September 13.

According to the senior military officer, “Haqqani” is “a direct continuation of the ISI.” In addition, Washington virtually accused Islamabad of committing other attacks as well. Among them is a recent attack on a U.S. base in eastern Afghanistan where 77 soldiers were injured.

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In Pakistan, a pattern of disappearances

October 3, 2011

Karin Brulliard/THE WASHINGTON POST – Amina Janjua holds a photo of herself with her husband, Masood Janjua, who disappeared in Peshawar in 2005, and remains missing. She has since formed a network of more than 1,000 families whose relatives have disappeared.

By , The Washington Post, October 3, 2011

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — In between hearings on an employment dispute and a property crime, a lawyer stood in Courtroom 3 on a recent morning to recount what seemed a terrifying offense. Fourteen months ago, he said, civil servant Adil Shah was buying vegetables when he was detained by about 10 men in military and police uniforms, and his family had not seen or heard from him since.

The judge barely blinked. There was no gasp from the wooden benches of the gallery. So routine are the grim cases of enforced disappearances in Pakistan — referred to here as missing persons — that they are now discussed like other chronic woes, such as power cuts and inflation. This northwestern city’s High Court hears five cases a day.Continues >>

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New York City police arrest over 700 anti-Wall Street protesters

October 3, 2011

By Sandy English, wsws.org,  October 3, 2011

Over 700 anti-Wall Street protesters were arrested Saturday on the Brooklyn Bridge by the New York Police Department (NYPD) after the cops had allowed them to enter the roadway reserved for motorized vehicles.

The mass arrests mark a major escalation in police intimidation tactics. It came on the heels of acts of police brutality, such as the pepper-spraying of unresisting demonstrators and the arrest of over 80 marchers last weekend, which have sparked widespread anger and resulted in the swelling of the protest’s ranks.

Behind the demonstration, which began as an occupation of Zuccotti Plaza, a park near Wall Street, is the growing opposition in the US to the policies of the banks, corporations and the Obama administration, particularly among students and younger workers who confront an increasingly hostile jobs market, massive indebtedness due to student loans and the relentless attacks on wage levels and social benefits.

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The Curse of Cluster Bombs

October 3, 2011

By Tom Fawthrop, FPIF, September 30, 2011

Mother pod full of unexploded cluster bombs
Mother pod full of unexploded cluster bombs

Laos, a small landlocked country in Southeast Asia known as “the most bombed country on earth,” fittingly hosted an international disarmament conference in November 2010.

This was a follow-up to an Oslo conference in 2008 when 94 nations signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM), an international treaty to ban all cluster weapons following in the footsteps of the global campaign to ban landmines which came into force in 1999.

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Michael Parenti: Class Warfare Indeed

October 3, 2011
by Michael Parenti, CommonDreams.org, October 2, 2011

Over the last two decades or more, Republicans have been denouncing as “class warfare” any attempt at criticizing and restraining their mean one-sided system of capitalist financial expropriation. 

The moneyed class in this country has been doing class warfare on our heads and on those who came before us for more than two centuries. But when we point that out, when we use terms like class warfare, class conflict, and class struggle  to describe the system of exploitation we live under—our indictments are dismissed out of hand and denounced as Marxist ideological ranting, foul and divisive.

Amanda Gilson put it perfectly in a posting on my Facebook page: “[T]he concept of  ‘class warfare’ has been hi-jacked by the wrong class (the ruling class). The wealthy have been waging war silently and inconspicuously against the middle and the poor classes for decades! Now that the middle and poor classes have begun to fight back, it is like the rich want to try to call foul—the game was fine when they were the only ones playing it.”

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