Welcome to Sott.net
Sat, 16 Oct 2021
The World for People who Think

Puppet Masters
Map

Star of David

Israel orders Palestinian protest camp removed


Raw Story
Sun, 20 Jan 2013 09:50 UTC
Image
© AFP Photo
The Israeli army ordered Palestinian demonstrators on Sunday to evacuate a protest encampment in the West Bank consisting of four tents and a building under construction, a military spokesman said.

Three of the tents and the building near the Palestinian village of Beit Iksa were on land owned by the Jewish state, and the fourth tent was on the route of a planned separation barrier, the spokesman told AFP.

Activists on Friday set up the encampment to protest against Israel's intention to confiscate at least 124 acres (50 hectares) of land near the village, located on the northwestern outskirts of Jerusalem.

The activists said they were naming the village extension Bab al-Karama, Arabic for Gate of Dignity.

About 100 residents and activists were at the site when Israeli soldiers issued the "invasion removal orders," and minor scuffles broke out before the troops left the scene.
      Read More...
Dollars

Strauss-Kahn paid hotel maid $1.5 million: report


Raw Story
Sun, 20 Jan 2013 09:34 UTC
Image
© Diallo/AFP
Disgraced former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn paid a settlement of $1.5 million (1.1 million euros) to the New York hotel maid who accused him of sexual assault, a French newspaper reported Sunday.

Citing sources close to Strauss-Kahn, Le Journal du Dimanche said Nafissatou Diallo had received the payment under a confidential deal reached to settle her civil suit against him.

The newspaper said Diallo went away with about 70 percent of the sum after paying her defence team.

A judge announced the deal last month, with reports at the time suggesting Strauss-Kahn had paid up to $5 million in the settlement.
      Read More...
Bad Guys

The frog has boiled: Pentagon says protests are acts of "Low-level terrorism"

M. Frank Drover
The Daily Sheeple
Thu, 17 Jan 2013 00:00 UTC
First, the government responds to the September 11th attack by passing the Patriot Act, which is purportedly designed to protect us from foreign terrorists. Most of America cheers it on, never realizing that within the act is a broad definition for something categorized as domestic terrorism, or "activities that appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, or to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion."

Second, they pass the National Defense Authorization Act, which allows them, under the definitions for domestic terrorism set forth by the Patriot Act, to detain someone without trial and forever if they appear to be subverting the newly established status quo.

Third, they declare all federal property, or property being used for political events where Secret Service protection is present, as "events of national significance" through the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act. Undesirable demonstrators operating counter to the official narrative in these areas are herded into court approved free speech zones.
      Read More...
Attention

Israeli politician: Palestinian ghettos were always the plan

Amira Hass
Haaretz
Sun, 20 Jan 2013 19:58 UTC
Right-wing politician Naftali Bennett's plan to annex Israeli-controlled parts of the West Bank is just the logical next step in Israel's historic effort to ghettoize the Palestinians.

Image
© Tomer Appelbaum
Habaiyt Hayehudi's Naftali Bennett.
When Habayit Hayehudi party leader and rising political star Naftali Bennett calls for annexing Area C, the part of the West Bank under full Israeli security and civil control, he is following the logic of every single Israeli government: maximize the territory, minimize the Arabs.

Some may even interpret this as elections propaganda in favor of Habayit Hayehudi and endorse it warmly.

Bennett can propose annexation because every governing coalition since the Six-Day War - whether it was led by the Likud or Labor (or its precursor, Alignment) party, and whether its partners were Mafdal, Shas or Meretz - laid the spiritual and policy groundwork for him.

According to Bennett, about 60 percent of the West Bank - a.k.a. Area C - is annexable. What's important about Area C is not whether 50,000 Palestinians live there, as democratic, benevolent Bennett claims, while suggesting to naturalize them and grant them Israeli citizenship, or whether the number is around 150,000 (as my colleague Chaim Levinson reminded us earlier this week).
      Read More...
Attention

Israeli news broadcasters don't cry: Shlomi Eldar reflects on the live television report that profoundly changed the way he sees the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Ayelett Shani
Haaretz
Sat, 19 Jan 2013 19:35 UTC
Image
© Gali Eytan
Shlomi Eldar
As a commentator, you're considered an odd bird.

Let's say that for a time I was a person whom people liked not liking. It's very easy to be a well-liked commentator: you simply tell the public what it wants to hear. But I always chose to tell the truth. And regrettably, I was never wrong. Both in Operation Cast Lead [the 2008-09 campaign in Gaza] and [last November's follow-up] Operation Pillar of Defense, people were furious at me. People cursed me, sent messages, found me on Facebook and called me a Hamas man. But I saw where it was all going, and said so.

Not as a provocation.

No. I just say what I think. I read the situation, I don't go by gut feelings or political beliefs. I thought it was wrong to assassinate Ahmed Jabari [the head of Hamas' military wing]. Not because he didn't deserve to die. He deserved to die. But the method of eliminating some top person and thinking someone better will replace him is wrong. All you do is heighten the problem. A top figure in the defense establishment told me, "Israel built up Hamas, not by its deeds but by its failures."

Because we are always putting out fires.

All the decisions of the political leadership are made ad hoc, and aimed at putting out fires.
      Read More...
Attention

Israeli reporter admits suppressing images of 'piles of bodies of civilians' when Israel went 'crazy' in Gaza

Philip Weiss
Mondoweiss
Sun, 20 Jan 2013 15:42 UTC
A staggering, doom-laden interview published by Haaretz with an Israeli television journalist suggests that the full truth of what happened in Gaza 4 years ago was suppressed not only when the United States and its author stomped the Goldstone Report-- which alleged deliberate targeting of civilians-- but suppressed by Israelis too. Shlomi Eldar was Gaza correspondent for Channel 10 news. Here is what he saw and could not live with but put in "an envelope" and has never published, awaiting a commission of inquiry that never has come:
"I came into possession of shocking material. The kind of material that sends you to a psychologist. I have never shown it. Children who were shot. Piles of bodies of civilians... I came into possession of material about very grim events relating to the idea that Israel was deliberately 'going crazy.' Testimonies, images and much more. So many people were killed there."
Reflect that this was a slaughter initiated by a centrist government now perceived as center-left in Israeli politics. Reflect that a story that Eldar did report, a documentary called Precious Life about Israelis working to treat a Gaza infant born with an immune deficiency, was written up at great length by Tom Friedman in the New York Times, with a lecture to his readers that if they were going to criticize Israel, they should watch this video about the "real Middle East" so as to be "constructive."
      Read More...
Dollar

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein gets 75 percent raise

Mark Gongloff
Huffington Post
Fri, 18 Jan 2013 14:37 UTC
Image
Angry about your paycheck shrinking this year because the payroll tax cut expired? Well, this should cheer you right up: Goldman Sachs's CEO got a 75 percent raise this year.

Lloyd Blankfein made $21 million last year, including a $2 million salary and a $19 million bonus, CNN/Money reports. That bonus includes $5.6 million in cash. Bloomberg pegs the total pay at $19 million, but what's a couple of million dollars, really?

Blankfein's haul represents a 75 percent pay increase from the year before, CNN/Money notes. It is also nearly double the paltry $11.5 million that Jamie Dimon, CEO of the nation's biggest bank, JPMorgan Chase, took home.
      Read More...
War Whore

US assassination drones kill 8 in central Yemen


Press TV
Sun, 20 Jan 2013 13:17 UTC
Image

An American assasination drone
Eight people have been killed in the latest US assassination drone attacks in the Yemeni province of Marib.

Yemeni military officials said that the attacks were carried out by two American unmanned aerial vehicles in Abieda valley in the central province late on Saturday.

Local residents also said that two Saudi nationals were among the victims of the drone strikes.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, the local residents said that three of the bodies were burnt beyond recognition.

The US has increased the number of its drone attacks in Yemen.
      Read More...
Megaphone

New violence in Belfast may be about more than the flag

John F. Burns
NY Times
Sun, 20 Jan 2013 09:30 UTC
Image
© Peter Muhly/Agence France-Presse — Getty Image
Police officers in Belfast, Northern Ireland, remained with their armored vehicles as a car burned after violence between unionists and loyalists on Jan. 12.
For more than six weeks, it has been a dismal case of back-to-the-future, a crudely sectarian upheaval that has defied all attempts at peacemaking.

The scenes recall the sectarian bitterness that infused the 30 years of virtual civil war known as the Troubles: night after night of street protests marshaled by balaclava-wearing militants, who have updated their tactics by using social media to rally mobs; death threats to prominent politicians, some of whom have fled their homes and hidden under police guard; firebombs, flagstones and rocks hurled at churches, police cars and lawmakers' offices; protesters joined by rock-throwing boys of 8 and 9; neighborhoods sealed off for hours by the police or protesters' barricades.

Many had hoped that the old hatreds between Northern Ireland's two main groups - the mainly Protestant, pro-British unionists, and the mainly Roman Catholic republicans, with their commitment to a united Ireland - would recede permanently under the auspices of the Good Friday agreement. That accord was reached 15 years ago as a blueprint for the power-sharing government that now rules the province.
      Read More...
USA

Aaron Swartz: Cannon fodder in the war against internet freedom

John Naughton
Guardian
Sat, 19 Jan 2013 19:45 UTC
Image
© Photograph: Noah Berger/Reuters
Aaron Swartz, the US hacker and internet activist who killed himself earlier this month.
Governments are determined to control the internet, and if hackers like Swartz get in the way, they will be crushed.

On 11 January, a young American geek named Aaron Swartz killed himself, and most of the world paid no attention. In the ordinary run of things, "it was not an important failure", as Auden put it in Musée des Beaux Arts.

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

But Swartz's death came like a thunderbolt in cyberspace, because this insanely talented, idealistic, complex, diminutive lad was a poster boy for everything that we value about the networked world. He was 26 when he died, but from the age of 14 he had been astonishing those of us who followed him on the internet. In 10 years he had accomplished more than most people do in a lifetime.

In the days following his death, the blogosphere resounded with expressions of grief, sadness and loss not just from people who had worked with him, but also from those who only knew him from afar - the users of the things he helped to create (the RSS web feed, social news website Reddit, the Creative Commons copyright licences, for example), or those who had followed his scarily open and thoughtful blogging.
      Read More...
Amazon Smile
Revolt! T-shirts