Category: World News

Israel’s security cabinet is expected to decide to halt the war on Gaza at a meeting on Saturday, Israeli sources have said. The move would be seen as being preferable to entering an Egyptian-brokered formal ceasefire with Hamas, unnamed sources told the AFP and Reuters news agencies.
The 21-day-old conflict has left more than 1,150 Palestinians dead, at least a third of them children, and devastated infrastructure within the densely populated territory.

“The security cabinet will convene and that is where a decision will be made,” Tzipi Livni, Israel’s foreign minister, told Israel’s Channel 10 television when asked if the government would end the conflict.

“I have said the end doesn’t have to be in agreement with Hamas, but rather in arrangements against Hamas.”

Like they did for the Iraq War, the corporate media has grossly under-represented this week’s U.S. peace protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza. A Dec. 31st Associated Press story on the protests reported that “hundreds” of people had participated in “pro-Palestinian protests” on Tues., Dec. 30th, and made it seem as if these protests had only occurred in five cities: N.Y.C, L.A., Tampa and Fort Lauderdale, and Dearborn, Michigan.

LETTER FROM BETHLEHEM: Dear Friends and Family- It’s 2009 but I have a hard time calling it a new year. I didn’t go to a new year’s eve party – they were all canceled out of respect for the people in Gaza. Instead Hazem and I went to dinner with a few friends and came home to once again watch the news. The broadcasted firework displays, which have always amazed and dazzled me, only reminded me of the sky in Gaza.

Who imagined that in 2009, the world’s governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy – backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China – is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as “one of the great menace of our times” have an extraordinary story to tell — and some justice on their side.

Heavy fighting has taken place in and around Gaza City with Palestinian fighters putting up a stiff resistance to advancing Israeli ground forces. Large explosions and intense gun battles were reported from the Shejaiya neighbourhood late on Monday. Flares lit up the skies as Israeli helicopter gunships and fighter jets flew low over the the city.
Palestinian civilians are continuing to suffer as the Israeli military pushes deeper into the Gaza Strip. At least 548 people have been killed in the territory in the last 10 days, with at least 100 deaths reported since the Israeli ground offensive began on Saturday.

The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) condemns Israel ‘s massive bombardment of the Gaza Strip which has left over 300 dead and 1,400 wounded, with the tolls mounting. The Israeli Air Force dropped more than 100 bombs in dozens of locations throughout the Gaza Strip as children left school on Saturday. The dead include men, women and children in school uniforms.

Protests, riots and clashes with police have overtaken Greece for the sixth straight day since the fatal police shooting of a teenage boy in Athens Saturday night. One day after Wednesday’s massive general strike over pension reform and privatization shut down the country, more than a hundred schools and at least fifteen university campuses remain occupied by student demonstrators.

The federal manslaughter indictment of five Blackwater Worldwide security guards in the horrific massacre of more than a dozen Iraqi civilians in Baghdad may look like an exercise in accountability, but it’s probably the exact opposite — a whitewash that absolves the government and corporate officials who should bear ultimate responsibility.

Five Blackwater Worldwide security guards indicted in Washington for the 2007 shooting of Iraqi civilians plan to surrender to the FBI today in Utah, a person close to the case said, setting up a fight over the trial site. The five guards, all military veterans, were indicted for their roles in a 2007 shooting in Baghdad that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead.

Canada’s Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, shut down the country’s legislature yesterday until January 26, in an effort to avoid a no-confidence vote that he was about to lose. This has provoked a constitutional crisis. Canada’s parliamentary opposition reacted with outrage. The opposition accused Harper of undermining Canada’s democracy. Thousands demonstrated yesterday in protest of the shut-down.

The terrorist attacks in Mumbai call out to President-elect Barack Obama and his advisors to rethink the signature blunder of George W. Bush’s eight years in office – the so-called War on Terror. As US intelligence reports have made clear, the centerpiece of the supposed campaign against terror, the military occupation of Iraq, has increased the likelihood of more attacks like those in Mumbai, Madrid, London and Manhattan.
by Steve Weissman

At least 34 anti-government protesters in Thailand, who for months have occupied the prime minister’s office in Bangkok, have been injured in a grenade attack. The latest blast comes amid a standoff between police and thousands of demonstrators who have occupied Bangkok’s main airports, crippling the country’s tourism industry.