Category: Politics

They just “want to die”.So when Yusuf Sweitat, who had no prior connection with Palestinian militants, drove to the Israeli town of Hadera on 28 October 2001, and shot dead four Israeli women at a bus stop before being gunned down himself by Israeli police, that was nothing to do with the fact that ten days earlier he had watched twelve-year-old Riham Ward bleed to death in his arms after being struck by an IDF tank shell as she sat at her school desk at the Ibrahimiya Elementary School in Jenin…. And it was entirely coincidental that seven days after the IDF shot dead 15-year-old stone-thrower Amjad Al-Masri, and six days after the IDF fired upon Amjad’s funeral procession, killing his cousin Mohammed, Amjad’s 17-year-old brother Iyad blew himself up in Ginsafut near Qalqilya.It is increasingly hard to see the difference in kind between the Nazi regime and what is practiced in Israel today. Expropriation. Misuse of the laws and power organs of the state to oppress a group on racial and religious grounds. What has to happen to end this persecution and our endorsement, both tacit and explicit of it? The weblog from which this excerpt is taken is an incredibly detailed and informed look at the Israeli-Palestine conflict. The resource list alone is especially useful, as it is both comprehensive and well-annotated. The more you know, the worse it becomes:

Invited and welcomed into Portugal, Spain, England and Russia through the ages, the Jews failed to take advantage of the opportunity to integrate into their new societies and work for the national benefit…. Most recently in Russia, after the Oligarchs grabbed the national assets of Russia for a song, as a group Jews find themselves ostracised and condemned and their wealth confiscated.

Shadow system to secretly move trillions of dollars—a system that can be exploited by tax evaders, drug runners and even terrorists.: Clearstream has a double system of accounting, with secret, non-published accounts that banks and big corporations use to make transfers they don’t want listed on the official books…. Clearstream carried an account for a notoriously criminal Russian bank for several years after the bank had officially “collapsed,” and clearinghouse accounts camouflaged the destinations of transfers to Colombian banks.

Link: Salon.com Technology | Santa’s sweatshop. Unlike the United States, the European Union has a 48-hour work-week limit, with some loopholes and exceptions. In Canada, after 48 hours, all overtime is voluntary and can’t be imposed by an employer. But in the United States, the strongest law limiting overtime is in Maine, where employees can be required to work only 80 hours of overtime in any given two-week period. That law came about in 2000, after a lineman working to get the power back on after a storm toiled more than 90 hours with few breaks before he accidentally electrocuted…

“What they’ve realized now is that cultural warfare not only works but it triumphs — that stigmatizing, demonizing not only is a device, it is the device,” Gabler said. “It is the way to govern the country.””The Republicans ran directly and very successfully against the arts here,” said Alan Woods, a longtime professor of theater and cultural history at Ohio State University.