In a scathing article by British journalist Robert Fisk titled "The Rotten State of Egypt is too Powerless and Corrupt to Act" published in the Independent on Wednesday, the seasoned Beirut-based reporter lashed out against the Egyptian regime in light of the recent assault on Gaza.

He opens his tirade with a sarcastic reference to the times of President Hosni Mubarak - "'La Vache Qui Rit', as he is still called in Cairo" - where the world is no longer worried about the anger of the Arab masses because you can always count on their governments to shut them down brutally and inhumanely.

Contrary to Israel's argument that it was forced to launch its air and ground offensive against Gaza in order to stop the firing of rockets into its territory, Hamas proposed in mid-December to return to the original Hamas-Israel cease-fire arrangement, according to a U.S.-based source who has been briefed on the proposal.

Also says President Bush has no need to apologize on financial crisis

Washington - Vice President Dick Cheney said Thursday that he sees no reason for President George W. Bush to pre-emptively pardon anyone at the CIA involved in harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists. "I don't have any reason to believe that anybody in the agency did anything illegal," he said.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Cheney also said that Bush has no need to apologize for not foreseeing the economic crisis.

"I don't think he needs to apologize. I think what he needed to do is take bold, aggressive action and he has," Cheney said.

"When the truth is replaced by silence," the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko said, "the silence is a lie." It may appear the silence is broken on Gaza. The cocoons of murdered children, wrapped in green, together with boxes containing their dismembered parents and the cries of grief and rage of everyone in that death camp by the sea, can be viewed on al-Jazeera and YouTube, even glimpsed on the BBC. But Russia's incorrigible poet was not referring to the ephemeral we call news; he was asking why those who knew the why never spoke it and so denied it. Among the Anglo-American intelligentsia, this is especially striking. It is they who hold the keys to the great storehouses of knowledge: the historiographies and archives that lead us to the why.

They know that the horror now raining on Gaza has little to do with Hamas or, absurdly, "Israel's right to exist." They know the opposite to be true: that Palestine's right to exist was canceled 61 years ago and the expulsion and, if necessary, extinction of the indigenous people was planned and executed by the founders of Israel. They know, for example, that the infamous "Plan D" resulted in the murderous depopulation of 369 Palestinian towns and villages by the Haganah (Jewish army) and that massacre upon massacre of Palestinian civilians in such places as Deir Yassin, al-Dawayima, Eilaboun, Jish, Ramle and Lydda are referred to in official records as "ethnic cleansing." Arriving at a scene of this carnage, David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, was asked by a general, Yigal Allon, "What shall we do with the Arabs?" Ben-Gurion, reported the Israeli historian Benny Morris, "made a dismissive, energetic gesture with his hand and said, 'Expel them'. The order to expel an entire population "without attention to age" was signed by Yitzhak Rabin, a future prime minister promoted by the world's most efficient propaganda as a peacemaker. The terrible irony of this was addressed only in passing, such as when the Mapan Party co-leader Meir Ya'ari noted "how easily" Israel's leaders spoke of how it was "possible and permissible to take women, children and old men and to fill the roads with them because such is the imperative of strategy ... who remembers who used this means against our people during the [Second World] war ... we are appalled."

Ban Ki-moon, the secretary-general of the United Nations has deliberately avoided issuing a condemnation of the Israeli army bombing of an UNRWA school in Gaza city that killed and wounded hundreds of civilians.

Thanks to the Mossad, Israel's "Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks", the Hamas was allowed to reinforce its presence in the occupied territories. Meanwhile, Arafat's Fatah Movement for National Liberation as well as the Palestinian Left were subjected to the most brutal form of repression and intimidation

Let us not forget that it was Israel, which in fact created Hamas. According to Zeev Sternell, historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, "Israel thought that it was a smart ploy to push the Islamists against the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO)".

Five years ago, the Bush administration lied about weapons of mass destruction to dupe us into supporting an illegal, immoral invasion of Iraq.

A few days ago, Israel trotted out only an infinitesimally more credible excuse -- the Hamas rockets case -- as justification for its own murderous shock and awe in Gaza, a long-planned campaign perniciously aimed at ousting a "regime" that came to power via popular, democratic vote.

Yes, such rockets exist, but they're little more than slingshots against Israel's incredible military might, and they're used out of desperation by Palestinians who've never been accorded the democratic space within which to gain redress of their eminently just grievances.

Israeli apologists have presented absurd propaganda about those devices.

We've been asked, for instance, what would we do if rockets were being launched on our homes in New York or Texas, from Canada or Mexico?

The proper answer is that, if those two nations had been unlawfully occupied or embargoed by the United States for 60 years of relentless oppression and repression, and if all attempts at peaceful change had been forcefully prevented or scuttled by the U.S., then such attacks would be an understandable, indeed a justifiable attempt at gaining intolerably deferred liberty.

Efforts to restore normal communications between Europe and Asia have suffered a setback after an important undersea cable broke for a second time, this time at a much greater depth.

Engineers from France Télécom had just finished repairing the Sea Me We 4 cable on Dec. 25 when the same cable broke again in a different place, this time 388 kilometers (241 miles) off the coast of Alexandria in Egypt, a France Télécom spokesman said Monday.

The repair ship the "Raymond Croz," which had just finished repairing the first break, was on its way to Sicily on Monday to pick up more cable to repair the second break, which happened more than 3,000 meters (9,800 feet) under the sea, the spokesman said.

The ship is expected to arrive at the site of the latest incident on Dec. 31 and the repairs now won't be completed until Jan. 4 or 5, the spokesman said, which would be 10 days later than originally expected.

The white house announced on Wednesday that the US president George Bush called the Egyptian president Husni Mubarak and thanked him for Egypt's "positive role" during the past few days of the war on the Gaza Strip.

It is hard to focus on the economies of the world when Palestinians are being blown to pieces by US supplied warplanes and smart bombs delivered by Zionism, one of the central evils on this planet. It is hard to focus when reading the inhumanity that spews forth from the mouths of the world's leaders in abject supplication to Zionism and the supporting voices of the ignorant and empathyless in the world's media.

But focus we must, for economics is the 'non-violent' means by which those same forces we see at work in Palestine exert their tentacles of control across this once beautiful and bounteous planet. While F16s and GBU-39s deliver death and suffering instantly, economics and more particularly the control of economies and money deliver their payload of death and suffering with a long slow interminable inevitability; an inevitability that has become a permanent feature for most people on earth and one that is fast approaching the doorsteps of the US and Europe.

It is no coincidence that Israel's latest war crimes come during the financial crisis; for empathy and the desire to defend the helpless victims of naked aggression are quick to evaporate when people are fearful for their own safety and security.