The always excellent Max Blumenthal notes that Netanyahu wants GOP to win but he already has Obama in a corner on Iran.
Continue reading “Will Israel use the US elections to push Obama into war with Iran?”
Author: alannahpriestley
TaxCast
I encourage readers to tune in to the Tax Justice Network‘s excellent montly TaxCast. Hosted by Naomi Fowler, each 15 minute podcast follows the latest news relating to tax evasion, tax avoidance and the shadow banking system. The show will feature discussions with experts in the field to help analyse the top stories each month.
You can now listen to the inaugural TaxCast which discusses the implications of the Vodafone vs India landmark tax case, compares Bill Gates and Mitt Romney’s attitudes to taxation and visits the Occupy camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral in London.
Torture inside Homs
Courageous reporting from inside Syria by Al Jazeera’s Jane Ferguson.
The Syrian government has been blamed by opposition groups for imprisoning tens of thousands of protesters calling for reform since the uprising began in March 2011.
Rights groups beleive many of the prisoners have been tortured, some until death. Outside the prisons, the government has continued its military crackdowns protests, killing thousands of people across the country.
In the third part of a series of exclusive reports, Jane Ferguson goes inside Homs, one of the main targets of President Bashar al-Assad’s security forces.
Racism Report: Africans in Israel
David Sheen‘s devastating report for the African Refugee Development Center (ARDC) on the mistreatment of asylum seekers in Israel was submitted to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) on January 30, 2012.
Afghanistan’s last Jew
Having lived through Communism, the mujaheddin and the Taliban, Zebolon Simontov is the last remaining Jew in Afghanistan.
Israel to become biggest jailer of refugees
Lia Tarachansky reports from Israel.
Knesset approves plan to jail asylum seekers for longest period of western world in biggest prison.
Hardtalk with Gore Vidal
This one is from 2008. Gore Vidal on the BBC’s Hardtalk.
Torture in Libya
It is a shame that Libya’s new rulers have failed so miserably to distinguish themselves from their predecessor.
The UN Human Rights chief Navi Pillay has raised concerns about Libya’s armed brigades and the treatment of more than 8,500 detainees, majority of whom are from sub-Saharan Africa.
Addressing the UN Security Council on the situation in Libya, Pillay warned that, “lack of oversight by the central authorities creates an environment conducive to torture and ill treatment.” She urged the Libyan ministry of justice and the prosecutor’s office to take over the detention centres.
Voices
Coriolanus in the public forum from Ralph Fiennes’s excellent adaptation.
Here’s the full speech:
Most sweet voices!
Better it is to die, better to starve,
Than crave the hire which first we do deserve.
Why in this woolvish toge should I stand here,
To beg of Hob and Dick, that do appear,
Their needless vouches? Custom calls me to’t:
What custom wills, in all things should we do’t,
The dust on antique time would lie unswept,
And mountainous error be too highly heapt
For truth to o’er-peer. Rather than fool it so,
Let the high office and the honour go
To one that would do thus. I am half through;
The one part suffer’d, the other will I do.
Here come more voices.
Your voices: for your voices I have fought;
Watch’d for your voices; for Your voices bear
Of wounds two dozen odd; battles thrice six
I have seen and heard of; for your voices have
Done many things, some less, some more your voices:
Indeed I would be consul.
Indians Against Democracy
by Pankaj Mishra
Growing up in India in the 1970s and 80s, I often heard people in upper-caste middle class circles say that parliamentary democracy was ill-suited to the country. Recoiling from populist politicians who pandered to the poor, many Indians solemnly invoked the example of Singapore’s leader Lee Kuan Yew. Here was an Oxbridge-educated and suitably enlightened autocrat, who suffered no nonsense about democracy, and, furthermore, believed firmly in the efficacy of publicly caning even minor breakers of the law. Devising his wise policies with the help of experts and technocrats, he simply imposed them on the population. Lee Kuan Yew’s success in transforming a city-state into a major economic power was apparent to all: clean, shiny, efficient, and prosperous Singapore, the very antithesis of corrupt and squalor-prone India.
Such yearnings for technocratic utopia may seem to have little in common with the middle class protests against “corruption” that recently gained much attention before abruptly losing steam at the end of the year. Led by Anna Hazare—an army veteran described in the foreign press as a “simple man in a Gandhian cap” when he went on a hunger strike last summer— the movement was presented by sections of the media in both India and the West as a long overdue political awakening of the middle class, even as India’s “second freedom struggle.” With his unambiguous denunciations of venality in public life, Hazare seemed to have alerted tens of millions of otherwise apolitical Indians to the possibilities of civil society, mass mobilization, and grass-roots activism.
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