Peace and Justice Post

BBC News, April 22, 2011

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Amateur video purportedly showing large protests across the country

Protesters in Syria have reported 60 people killed by security forces – the highest death toll in five weeks of unrest against President Assad.

Demonstrators were shot when they gathered following Friday prayers, a day after the country’s decades-long state of emergency was lifted.

Many of the deaths reportedly occurred in the village of Ezra and in the Douma suburb of the capital, Damascus.

At least 260 people are said to have died since unrest began last month.

Protesters across the country chanted for the overthrow of the regime, Reuters news agency reported.

President Bashar al-Assad’s lifting of the emergency had been seen as a concession to them.

In their first joint statement since the protests broke out, activists co-ordinating the mass demonstrations demanded the establishment of a democratic political system.

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By Rupert Cornwell in Washington, The Independent, Apr 21, 2011

GETTY IMAGES

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern has been a high-profile critic of Bradley Manning’s treatment

By Paul Bignell, The Independent, April 19, 2011

Reuters

A British Army soldier investigates a large fire near Basra’s Shuiba refinery

by Richard Falk, Foreign Policy Journal, April 22, 2011

Ever since it first struck the raw nerve of Israeli political consciousness, I thought it misleading to associate the Goldstone Report so exclusively with its chair, Judge Richard Goldstone. After all, despite his deserved prominence as an international jurist, he was the least qualified substantively of the four members of the mission. Undoubtedly, part of the intensely hostile Israeli reaction of their highest political leaders had to do with the sense that Goldstone as a devoted Zionist had been guilty of betrayal, even of ‘a blood libel’ against the Jewish people, because he seemed to be elevating his fidelity to the ‘law’ above that of tribal loyalties, and according to Tel Aviv he should never have been mixed up with such a suspect entity as the UN Human Rights Council in the first place.

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By Dolores Cox , Workers World, April 21, 2011

Mumia Abu-Jamal

It has been almost 30 years since the case of the internationally renowned political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal officially opened in December 1981. In April 2009 the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Abu-Jamal’s appeal and returned it to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.

Mumia Abu-Jamal now has a new legal team led by Christina Swarns, director of the Criminal Justice Project of the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund; and Judith Ritter, professor and director of the Criminal Defense Clinic at Widener University Law School in Wilmington, Del. They will be directing their defense strategy to not only fight reinstatement of Mumia’s death penalty but also overturn his conviction.

On April 3 in New York City supporters and human rights activists gathered at the historic Riverside Church to meet and honor the new lawyers. The event was moderated by Suzanne Ross of the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition (NYC), with the room filled to capacity. The gathering was also video-streamed live worldwide.

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The democracy uprising in the Arab world has been a spectacular display of courage, dedication, and commitment by popular forces — coinciding, fortuitously, with a remarkable uprising of tens of thousands in support of working people and democracy in Madison, Wisconsin, and other U.S. cities. If the trajectories of revolt in Cairo and Madison intersected, however, they were headed in opposite directions: in Cairo toward gaining elementary rights denied by the dictatorship, in Madison towards defending rights that had been won in long and hard struggles and are now under severe attack.

Each is a microcosm of tendencies in global society, following varied courses. There are sure to be far-reaching consequences of what is taking place both in the decaying industrial heartland of the richest and most powerful country in human history, and in what President Dwight Eisenhower called “the most strategically important area in the world” — “a stupendous source of strategic power” and “probably the richest economic prize in the world in the field of foreign investment,” in the words of the State Department in the 1940s, a prize that the U.S. intended to keep for itself and its allies in the unfolding New World Order of that day.

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Desperate emails speak of ‘genocide’ as doctors who have treated injured protesters are rounded up

By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor, The Independent, Apr 21, 2011

EPA

Medical staff of the Salmaniya Medical Complex rush a victim of the clashes between security forces and opposition protesters to the hospital in Manama, Bahrain

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By M K Bhadrakumar, Asia Times, April 19, 2011

Twice during the past week senior United States officials have let it be known that the Barack Obama administration has chosen to adopt a highly selective approach to the ferment in the Middle East.

The US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton couched the message in appropriate diplomatic idiom in Washington last Tuesday in a speech at a gala dinner celebrating the US-Islamic World Forum before an audience of dignitaries from the Middle East includingthe foreign ministers of Qatar and Jordan and the secretary-general of the Organization of Islamic Conference.

Clinton acknowledged that the ”long Arab winter has begun to thaw” and after many decades, a ”real opportunity for lasting change” has appeared before the Arab people. It, in turn, raises ”significant questions” but it is not for the US to provide all the answers. ”In fact, here in Washington we’re struggling to thrash out answers to our own difficult political and economic questions,” she said.

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In 2007, Netanyahu said he would agree to join Ehud Olmert’s government if Israel attacked Iran, a WikiLeaks document shows.

By Ofer Aderet and Yossi Melman, Haaretz, April 21, 2011

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed willingness to join Ehud Olmert’s government in 2007 if Israel initiated an attack on Iran, a document from the Israeli WikiLeaks collection has revealed.

On July 20, 2007, Marc J. Sievers, the political counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv, sent a telegram to the State Department in Washington on the matter. The telegram was classified “Confidential,” the level between “Unclassified” and “Secret.”

	Ehud Olmert and Benjamin Netanyahu, March 31, 2009.
	Photo by: AP

Sievers’ message dealt with the formation of a new Israeli government and was written on the eve of the release of the state comptroller’s report on the Second Lebanon War, a year after it started. Ehud Olmert was still prime minister and headed the Kadima party. The Labor Party was his senior partner in the ruling coalition. Two days before Sievers sent his message, Defense Minister Amir Peretz, the head of Labor, resigned as defense minister and deputy prime minister.

Part of the telegram was devoted to the possibility of the establishment of a national unity government, in which the Likud Party would join Kadima, with Olmert as prime minister.

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The Times of India, April 19, 2011

“There is a perception that there is a lot of money going to Pakistan,” Shaikh told the Woodrow Wilson Center policy think-tank.

“It is largely a myth that Pakistan is a beneficiary of tens of billions of dollars. The truth is that in the Kerry-Lugar-Berman arrangement this year we have not even received $300 million,” he added.

Pakistan is dependent on foreign aid and plagued by political instability and violence. Massive floods last year, the worst natural disaster the country has ever seen, affected three million people, destroyed crops and swept away roads and bridges, causing over $10 billion in damage and wiping out about 2 percentage points of gross domestic product.

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