This is one of the ways that Palestinians describe the conditions under which nearly 1.5 million of them have been living: in an area of some 360 square kilometres, closed in on three sides by sophisticated barbed-wire fences, concrete walls and military lookout towers, and to the west by Israeli navy ships that seal them off from the sea.

 

Overhead, in the sky, unmanned aircraft and hot air balloons continually photograph whatever happens inside this closed cage, which has seven gates connecting it to the world, all of which are sealed off almost hermetically. 

The 41st Kilometre

Rice wins no firm Mid-East vows

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has ended a Middle East tour without firm commitments to a conference on the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

But she said the talks, due to be held in the US by the end of the year, still had a "reasonable chance of success".

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas accused Israel of holding up a joint document with the Palestinians.

He said time was running out and the Palestinians could opt out of the conference without the document.

Rice subpoenaed in spying trial
James Coomarasamy
BBC News, Washington
A federal judge has ordered US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other senior colleagues to testify in the trial of two pro-Israel lobbyists.

The lobbyists are accused of passing classified information to government officials and journalists in Israel.

They say they were regularly asked by the US government to give information to the Israelis.

Ms Rice's court appearance could shed light on American policy-making in the Middle East.

The two defendants in the case are former lobbyists for the influential American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac.

They are accused of passing secrets obtained from a since-convicted Pentagon official to government officials and media outlets in Israel.

----------------------

Gus: how embarassing: I can't recall... Nothing at all... but on second thought I will deny anything, just to be safe... And what is Aipac...? What? Sounds like a medicine or sumpthin' for male potency... Israel? Ah... now you're telling me. And you want me to shed some light on it? How could I? I've got no idea about anything... anywhere... anytime... Just ask the little kid in the White House... He still believes in the Easter Bunny. Would you like me to play the piano?

Why Her Dreams Crashed Rice's Worldview Flipped, And Her Policies Flopped

By Fred Kaplan Sunday, November 4, 2007; Page B01

 

As Condoleezza Rice jets around the world, she must sometimes wonder where she's going. Over her three years as secretary of state, she has squandered great opportunities by putting faith and loyalty above her old worldview. The problem isn't just that she has swerved from the realism that propelled her to prominence; it's that the result has been a shambles.

Rice isn't used to failure, and most Americans aren't used to thinking of her as one. In Beltway wisdom, she's the star of President Bush's second-term team, someone who has employed smarts, sense and style to try to steer a wiser course in the world. But if she is now veering back to realism, it's after too long a detour into post-9/11 messianism. Rice remains one of the architects of a fantasy foreign policy, and her record as secretary of state gives little hope that she'll be able to reverse that verdict in the administration's final months.

---------------

Gus: with Pakistan fraying at the seams, and nothing anywhere having been solved as "planned", including Iraq, the legacy of the girl who travels a lot, had Bushit le-prez's ears and was his ultra-right brains for all we know, has achieved... not much. All has gone arse up, negative in the doldrums and it would take a Super-Woman to reverse the trend... Possible though. But Rice? No. Her neo-conservative US-knows-best ways have to be ditched forthwith and a culture of proper human nature understanding needs to placed in a bag of reality, with a sprinkle of humility...

Get rid of Johnnee though. His "friendship" with Musharraf the tinpot is only because Mr Moosh has pledged to fight terrorism — this, only in order to fill his coffers (those of his country) with US largess. Thus Osama is still living in Pakistan, odds on. And Musharraf has arrested the most moderate people, leaving the extremists more or less alone... That should be a worry... Fighting terrorism? Kill a few here and there, pay lip service and collect the dosh. Johnnee has fallen for the illusion... The worrying thing thing is that Bushit knows... Does this means he's cleverer than our Johnnee? Goodness me!!!

Israel seeks US help to fight Iranian pistachios

A US official says Israel has asked for US help in cracking down on illegal pistachio nut imports from Iran, after Washington warned the trade was hurting efforts to curb Tehran's nuclear programme.

Israel imports pistachios worth 100 million shekels ($29.8 million) annually, mostly from Turkey.

But Washington says nuts from arch-foe Iran are mixed in with the shipments, undermining economic sanctions meant to force Tehran to stop developing its nuclear capabilities.

US Under Secretary of Agriculture Mark Keenum urged Israeli Agriculture Minister Shalom Simhon this week to combat the problem. Mr Simhon agreed, but asked for guidance on how Israel might proceed...

The power of America's "Jewish lobby" is said to be legendary.

Commentators the world over refer to it, as though it were a well-established fact that US Jews wield far more influence than their numbers (2% of the population) would suggest.

But this presumed influence is also a delicate issue in the US, and is rarely analysed.

How does the lobby work? Is its power truly legendary, or just a legend?

Two US academics, John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard, have set out to answer those questions, and triggered a firestorm of controversy as a result.

Their book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, which builds on a 2006 article in the London Review of Books, says the reasons for US support for Israel need to be explained.

America spends $3bn a year in largely military assistance - one-sixth of its direct aid budget - to help a prosperous, nuclear-armed country, and strongly backs Israel in negotiations on Middle East peace.

But according to Mearsheimer and Walt, the US gets remarkably little in return.

They reject the argument that Israel is a key ally in America's "war on terror".

On the contrary, they contend, US patronage of Israel fuels militant anger - as well as fostering resentment in Arab countries that control vital oil supplies.

---------------

Gus: recently, a good friend ask me if I believed the US was under the thumb of a Jewish lobby — or any other conspiratorial unit for that matter... Hum, I had to tell him, that I knew, in the back streets of Pittsburg, of a little Jewish tailor shop... I had been told, unreliably of course, this is where the Grand Doodah works by day, before donning his Grand Master of the Universe outfit, sawn by his good hands, to a monthly meeting at the grand hall of doodahs from other grand halls around the US and the world... See, my great-grand-father was a tailor, my grand-father was a tailor and my father was a tailor, a couple of my brothers learned the "craft"... until "other jews" invented the ready-made off the rack stuff. The family business sunk, after these off-the-rack people even started to industrialise big clothes for big people... They even sold bigger adjustable elastic braces, for goodness sake...

I read somewhere today that IBM apparently provided Hitler with the data that gave the addresses and status of Jews around Germany...

It is always difficult to prove conspiracies, especially when being crafted under cover from huge government agencies. For example, the war in Iraq WAS driven by a huge conspiracy to defraud the trust of the majority of people... Can this be proven? of course! But then people who were the low instruments of this massive heist would start to lose life like flies swatted on a window pane, should we ask too many questions. The truth will come out, not sweat, but it will take time as every foresic dig will be hampered by more fudge and a few sticky buns...

Just to be on the safe side, vote John Howard out...

US, Mid East talks 'doomed to failure': Iran

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's top authority, said a US-organised Middle East conference was "doomed to failure" and said it was being held to help Israel not the Palestinians.

The United States wants to restart peace talks on Palestinian statehood by bringing together Arabs and Israelis at a meeting on Tuesday (local time) in Annapolis, Maryland.

Iran, which does not recognise Israel, has opposed the plan from the outset.

"All politicians in the world are aware that this conference is doomed to failure," Mr Khamenei told a parade of Basij religious militia in an address televised live on state television.

"They hope that in this way [by holding this conference], they can give assistance to the Zionists," he said, referring to Israel.

Mr Khamenei, who has the last say in all matters of state in Iran, had urged Muslim countries to boycott the meeting.

"Arab countries must be aware of the plots and tricks by the Zionist enemy," President Mahmood Ahmadinejad said in a telephone conversation with Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, Iranian state media reported.

"I wish the name of Saudi Arabia was not listed among the attending states at the Annapolis conference," he was quoted as telling the king, whose country will be represented at the talks.

------------------

Gus: Hey. Mr Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. ease up a little... Saudi Arabia has been a major backer of the Palestinians for a long time... According to my Jewish friends, the Saudis could have helped sort out the Palestinian problem long ago, but chose to let the sore fester as much as possible — annoying Israel and the US, using Palestinian fodder to keep their own hands "clean"... Remember that most of the Twin Towers terrorists came from Saudi Arabia... Bush only sees money and oil... He still cannot tell the difference between a horse and a cow... Bush will chastise Israel for carrying on building housing in the "occupied" territories, but will still provide Israel with the sand and cement to do so... Don't worry, the Saudi king will find a way to share some values, including petrodollars, with the West:

------------------

Saudi rape victim 'having affair'

Saudi justice officials say a woman who was sentenced to prison and flogging after she was gang-raped has now confessed to an extramarital affair.

The case of the unidentified woman, 19, drew international criticism after an appeal increased her 90-lash sentence to 200 lashes and six months' jail.

The justice ministry statement rejected "foreign interference" in the case.

It insisted the ruling was legal and that the woman had "confessed to doing what God has forbidden".

The statement carried by the official press agency late on Saturday said the sentence would be carried out in accordance with Saudi law.

The woman was initially to be punished for violating strict gender segregation laws in Saudi Arabia, for riding in the car of a man who was not related to her when they were both attacked.

"The Saudi justice minister expressed his regret about the media reports over the role of the woman in this case which put out false information and wrongly defend her," the statement said.

"The charged girl is a married woman who confessed to having an affair with the man she was caught with."

---------------------------

Gus: grand propaganda rubbish. Had that been the case, the woman would have more likely been stoned to death. If the woman confessed, could it have been under the well-tried (but unreliable for truth extraction) methods of water-boarding, or psychological brainwashing religious blackmail, etc? Whatever happened to the West supporting the implementation of human rights in regressive countries, in which women are treated as second class citizens?... Roll out the red carpets for the males...

As veteran Middle East commentator Robert Fisk says, the speeches at Annapolis are "an exercise in self-delusion".

In order to look at what the future holds for the Arab-Israeli conflict in the aftermath of Annapolis, we have to examine the real power behind these talks, namely the United States government and the powerful Israeli military state on one side, and on the other the Arab regimes whose rulers survive only through obedience to the US, and the divided Palestinian leadership, representing millions of people suffering under occupation, without basic human rights, and facing increasingly abject poverty.

...

As Jeff Halper, an Israeli human rights activist says, Prime Minister Olmert is limiting the peace process to "a willingness to grant them (Palestinians) a tiny Bantustan on four or five cantons, all encircled by Israeli settlements and the military"

--------------------

Gus: strangely enough I would hope the Bush Administration or ANY US administration could solve the problems in the Middle East... But my sad feeling of these silly show bags are expressed in my sad cartoon at the top... The US meddling attitude — based on US needs — rather than solving is also part of the bigger problems... OIL OIL OIL!

Israel Approves West Bank Construction

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: March 9, 2008

JERUSALEM (AP) -- Israel announced plans to build hundreds of homes in the West Bank and disputed east Jerusalem, drawing Palestinian condemnation just days before a visit by a U.S. general to monitor the troubled peace process.

Housing Minister Zeev Boim said the new housing would include 350 apartments in Givat Zeev, a West Bank settlement just outside of Jerusalem, and 750 homes in the Pisgat Zeev neighborhood of east Jerusalem.

Speaking to Israel Radio, Boim said the Givat Zeev construction initially began some eight years ago, but was suspended because of fighting with the Palestinians.

''When violence subsided, demand grew again and contractors renewed their permits to build there,'' he said. The Pisgat Zeev construction, he added, ''is inside Jerusalem's city borders.''

Israel captured the West Bank and east Jerusalem in the 1967 Mideast war. It immediately annexed east Jerusalem and considers all of the city its capital. The annexation has not been recognized internationally.

---------------------

Gus: more and more, the Swiss cheese of Jewish Palestine, probably a smelly Emmenthaler — but a cheese with holes — is looking like a stinking Gruyère — a cheese with no holes, despite the myths. See toon at top...

Israel said Monday that it would build hundreds of new homes on occupied land it considers part of Jerusalem, just hours after U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wrapped up a three-day visit to the region by saying the peace process is "moving in the right direction." 

The announcement of the new construction, the latest in a series of similar projects advanced by Israel in recent months, was likely to anger Palestinians. The issue also elicited criticism from Rice, who called on Israel to stop building in contested territory even before Monday's announcement. 

"Settlement activity should stop - expansion should stop," Rice said at a news conference after meeting with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. 

Israel Planning To Build Hundreds Of New Homes

Congress to hear of alleged Syrian, NKorean nuke cooperation

By PAMELA HESS and MATTHEW LEE

Associated Press Writers

WASHINGTON (AP) - Members of Congress will be told this week about intelligence linking North Korea to Syria's alleged nuclear program, congressional officials said Tuesday.

The Senate and House intelligence committees were scheduled to be briefed on Thursday.

North Korea has been suspected of helping Syria with a secret nuclear program, but both countries deny it. Pyongyang says it has never spread its nuclear expertise beyond its borders.

The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that U.S. intelligence officials will tell the committees North Korea was helping Syria build a plutonium-fueled reactor. Israeli warplanes bombed a site in Syria on Sept. 6 that private analysts say may have been the site of a reactor, based on commercial satellite imagery taken after the raid. The site later was razed and wiped clean.

One senior administration official said Thursday's briefing was scheduled because the intelligence community had been deluged for months with congressional requests for information about North Korean activity in Syria and the Israeli airstrike and felt it was now time to brief lawmakers.

------------------

Gus: a plutonium reactor? On several count the plutonium technology has to be AAA1+ to be workable. Second, even fast-breeders (plutonium) reactors being better on paper are not as profitable as other types due to safety and other factors such as the cost of plutonium (up to 4,000 US$ per gram)... A fast breeder typically demands several tonnes of plutonium as seed (some use around 2.2 tonnes in India, some reactors use about 5.7 tonnes each in France). It generates more Uranium 233 (more radio-active) from U238. The technology also requires several thousand tonnes of liquid sodium, highly dangerous at temperature and flammable. When the world first commercial fast breeder was built in France, the time to a melt down of the core was within seconds should the sodium flow (heated up to 750 degree Celsius by the reaction) be interrupted... Hope safety margins have improved ... Good luck.

Syrian Ambassador Imad Moustapha yesterday angrily denounced the U.S. and Israeli assertions. "If they show a video, remember that the U.S. went to the U.N. Security Council and displayed evidence and images about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I hope the American people will not be as gullible this time around," he said.

U.S. officials said that Israel shared the video with the United States before the Sept. 6 bombing, after Bush administration officials expressed skepticism last spring that the facility, visible by satellite since 2001, was a nuclear reactor built with North Korea's assistance. Israel has a nuclear weapons arsenal that it has never declared.

But beginning today, intelligence officials will tell members of the House and Senate intelligence, armed services and foreign relations committees that the Syrian facility was not yet fully operational and that there was no uranium for the reactor and no indication of fuel capability, according to U.S. officials and intelligence sources.

David Albright, president of Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) and a former U.N. weapons inspector, said the absence of such evidence warrants skepticism that the reactor was part of an active weapons program.

"The United States and Israel have not identified any Syrian plutonium separation facilities or nuclear weaponization facilities," he said. "The lack of any such facilities gives little confidence that the reactor is part of an active nuclear weapons program. The apparent lack of fuel, either imported or indigenously produced, also is curious and lowers confidence that Syria has a nuclear weapons program."

U.S. intelligence officials will also tell the lawmakers that Syria is not rebuilding a reactor at the Al Kibar site. "The successful engagement of North Korea in the six-party talks means that it was unlikely to have supplied Syria with such facilities or nuclear materials after the reactor site was destroyed," Albright said. "Indeed, there is little, if any, evidence that cooperation between Syria and North Korea extended beyond the date of the destruction of the reactor."

-----------------

Gus: It would be completely silly for anyone to build a plutonium reactor should one build one "to make plutonium atom bombs". It takes approximately about 5.6 kg of plutonium to make a bomb and a minimum of 2 tonnes of plutonium to make a reactor work at best (see blog above). Sure the plutonium used in nuclear power stations is not weapon grade but there would be enough to make about 1.6 tonnes of weapon grade plutonium — about 280 small nuclear bombs or about 50 big ones...

Either the CIA is selling us a furphy, either the Syrians are dumb, either the Syrians are devious and clever enough to let the CIA believe the Syrians are building a plutonium reactor in a location, when the plutonium is actually somewhere else — being processed. The Syrians would know that history repeats itself and that the Israelis blew up Saddam's nuke reactor in 1981 (article date 2001) before it was completed... The Israelis do that... 

Today, administration officials have briefed select Congressional committees on an issue of great international concern.

Until 6 September, 2007, the Syrian regime was building a covert nuclear reactor in its eastern desert capable of producing plutonium. We are convinced, based on a variety of information, that North Korea assisted Syria's covert nuclear activities. We have good reason to believe [gus: a large part of uranium use is nuclear weapons, may be 50 %] that reactor, which was damaged beyond repair on 6 September of last year, was not intended for peaceful purposes.

Carefully hidden from view, the reactor was not configured for such purposes. In defiance of its international obligations, Syria did not inform the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of the construction of the reactor, and, after it was destroyed, the regime moved quickly to bury evidence of its existence.

This cover-up only served to reinforce our confidence that this reactor was not intended for peaceful activities.

-------------------

Gus: Not intended for peaceful activities... Hum... Thus this was not a plutonium reactor but an alleged plutonium producing reactor... Important note: ALL NUCLEAR REACTORS produce plutonium... IT IS UNAVOIDABLE unless the reactor uses thorium. A nuclear reactor needs many tonnes (160 tonnes) of enriched uranium and produces substantial quantities of plutonium (US$4000 per gram of nuclear bomb grade plutonium) — enrichment being a lengthy and costly process that the Iranians are supposed to still be working towards, having only 20 % of the centrifuges needed. The Iranians are in partnership with the French in this industry anyway, since the Shah of Iran (a pupped of the west) invested huge amount of money (10 per cent of research) in the French nuclear industry. The Iranians are also "helped" by the Russians to develop their nuclear industry...

The rest is just fluff from Israel and the USA who bloody well know that ALL REACTORS produce plutonium.

The English had a major spectacular failure recently in their new reprocessing plant and had to ship spent fuel to France for reprocessing (extracting plutonium, removing "waste", turning the U238 into "useful" ballast of very low radio activity (close to negligible except in case of accident where the low level of U236 (unnatural) and U235 (natural) could be "exposed"... The Poms used to send their spent fuels to Japan in convoy under military escort before that...

There is not much use for plutonium except for making bombs or being used in "fast breeder" reactors which, due to cost of plutonium, security and complex technology does make it more expensive than uranium nuclear rectors.

ALL the nuclear industry is massively subsidised or owned by governments around the world at a loss in order to keep the price of electricity they produce competitive with coal. Without subsidies to the nuclear industry, solar energy would be a far better cheaper alternative, although more expensive than coal...

The "cover up" reinforcing confidence? Sorry, I may be wrong, but I can't buy that line either. The Syrians would bloody well know that the CIA spy satellites would pick up a pin-prick from the sky and that the Israel itch to bomb anything that looks suspicious. It could have been a nasty military site, who knows and that's why it might have been kept quiet on the Syrian side... They might be doing something unexpected but not the nuclear bozo. That's my view. I may be wrong but I don't think so.

Thus say that it is possible that the Syrians were planning to make a "plutonium producing" nuclear reactor... The true challenge beyond that is to extract the plutonium and turn it into weapon grade material. Only very few plants can do this around the world, in the US, in Russia, in France and in Japan... plus a bit in Switzerland... The reprocessing plant in the UK was a massive failure.

A great international concern?... It would better to negotiate rather than bomb n' stuff. Bombing only encourage the resolve of people to kick sand back in your face.

Cheney camp 'behind Syrian reactor claim'

US Government allegations that North Korea helped Syria build a nuclear reactor have been greeted with scepticism because of their timing.

Israeli jets bombed the alleged site in Syria's eastern desert last September.

Today, after months of whispers, the White House publicly claimed that the target of the strike was a nuclear reactor.

It said the reactor was being built with North Korean help and was not intended for peaceful purposes.

US intelligence officials said the reactor had been close to becoming operational when it was destroyed.

But Mike Chinoy, from the Pacific Council on International Policy, says the claim needs to be taken in its political context, as North Korea's denuclearisation reaches a critical stage.

"Everything I'm hearing from my own sources in Washington is that what you have now is a kind of push back by Vice-President [Dick] Cheney and his office and other hardliners who are opposed to diplomatic dealings with North Korea," he said.

"[They are] hoping that by making public these allegations of nuclear cooperation it will torpedo the diplomatic process."

--------------

Gus: life's starting to make sense again... (see blogs above)... And by the way, South Korea has 20 operating nuclear power stations while there are nil in North Korea...

... and The USA still have up to 60,000 troops in South Korea... 

The agency was critical of both the US delay in releasing the information and of Israel's bombing of the site before the IAEA could inspect it.

"The director general views the unilateral use of force by Israel as undermining the due process of verification that is at the heart of the non-proliferation regime," the statement said.

The statement is a clear indication that Mr ElBaradei is not accepting the US claims at face value and wants his own first-hand information, says BBC diplomatic correspondent Bridget Kendall.

Syrian officials have said the site that was bombed by Israel on 6 September 2007 was an unused military facility under construction. Building on the site had stopped some time before the air strike, the Syrians said.

Syrian leader denies building nuclear reactor


Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has denied in remarks published on Sunday (local time) that a site raided by Israel last year was a nuclear reactor under construction as charged by the United States.

Last September's Israeli air strike "hit a military site under construction, not a nuclear site as Israel and America claimed," Mr Assad told the Qatari daily Al-Watan in an interview.

"Does it make sense that we would build a nuclear facility in the desert and not protect it with anti-aircraft defences?" he asked.

"A nuclear site exposed to [spy] satellites, in the heart of Syria and in an open space?

"We don't want a nuclear bomb even if Iran acquires one," added Mr Assad, whose country is a close ally of Tehran, itself embroiled in a standoff with Washington over its nuclear activities.

"Where would we use it?... War in the region will effectively remain conventional," he said.

Mr Assad underlined that he believed Iran "does not think differently" on this score.

-------------

see blogs above... 

from the Independent

Israel has given us great novelists like Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, great film-makers like Joseph Cedar, great scientific research into Alzheimer's, and great dissident journalists like Amira Hass, Tom Segev and Gideon Levy to expose her own crimes.

She has provided the one lonely spot in the Middle East where gay people are not hounded and hanged, and where women can approach equality.

But I can't do it. Whenever I try to mouth these words, a remembered smell fills my nostrils. It is the smell of shit. Across the occupied West Bank, raw untreated sewage is pumped every day out of the Jewish settlements, along large metal pipes, straight onto Palestinian land. From there, it can enter the groundwater and the reservoirs, and become a poison.

Standing near one of these long, stinking brown-and-yellow rivers of waste recently, the local chief medical officer, Dr Bassam Said Nadi, explained to me: "Recently there were very heavy rains, and the shit started to flow into the reservoir that provides water for this whole area. I knew that if we didn't act, people would die. We had to alert everyone not to drink the water for over a week, and distribute bottles. We were lucky it was spotted. Next time..." He shook his head in fear. This is no freak: a 2004 report by Friends of the Earth found that only six per cent of Israeli settlements adequately treat their sewage.

Meanwhile, in order to punish the population of Gaza for voting "the wrong way", the Israeli army are not allowing past the checkpoints any replacements for the pipes and cement needed to keep the sewage system working. The result? Vast stagnant pools of waste are being held within fragile dykes across the strip, and rotting. Last March, one of them burst, drowning a nine-month-old baby and his elderly grandmother in a tsunami of human waste. The Centre on Housing Rights warns that one heavy rainfall could send 1.5m [1.5 million] cubic metres of faeces flowing all over Gaza, causing "a humanitarian and environmental disaster of epic proportions".

---------------

Gus: see toon at top. 

Children killed in Gaza shelling

Seven Palestinians have been killed after the Israeli Army shelled a house in the northern Gaza Strip.

Four children and an elderly man were among the dead; the children's mother was taken to hospital but died later as doctors struggled to save her life.
   
The health ministry said shells were fired at a house in the town of Beit Hanoun - the family inside were eating breakfast at the time.

The Israeli army say there was an air and tank attack on a group of armed men which were said to be nearby, but they say no houses were targetted.
   
David Chater, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Gaza described chaotic scenes at the house and pools of blood in the street and the wreckage of the house.

"There is an overwhelming feeling of bitterness and shock among the residents," he said.
 
The children were aged between seven months and five years old.

June 16, 2008
Rice Says Houses Hurt Mideast Talks
By ETHAN BRONNER

JERUSALEM — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Sunday that the thousands of housing units Israel is building on captured land were harming peace talks with the Palestinians. She also said she could not understand why Israel was still blocking three Fulbright grantees from leaving Gaza.

On the latest of her nearly monthly visits here to push along Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, Ms. Rice was more explicit than usual in asserting that the construction is reducing confidence in the talks. The United States hopes to get the two sides to produce a peace framework by year’s end, but the Palestinians say the new housing is a big stumbling block.

Referring to the construction of what Israel considers Jerusalem neighborhoods but much of the world considers illegal settlements, Ms. Rice said, “I do believe, and the United States believes, that the actions and the announcements that are taking place are indeed having a negative effect on the atmosphere for the negotiation — and that is not what we want.”

She stressed that any such building would not be considered permanent by the United States, saying, “The issue is to try to get back to a place where there is some confidence that this is not an effort to dictate or prejudge the final status outcome.”

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Gus: Dear Ms Rice, it's about time for the US to stop the supply of bricks and mortar to Israel. By this I mean that as long as the US supports Israel without any strong firm caveats in its support, there will not be any improvements in the relationships with the Palestinians. And I believe Ms Rice knows this and hypocritically pays lip service to an argument she flogs with wet lettuce.

see toon at top. 

The great divide...

 see toon at top

Israeli PM 'should be indicted'

Israeli police have formally recommended to prosecutors that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert be indicted in a corruption investigation.

The decision about whether to indict Mr Olmert now rests with Attorney General Meni Mazuz.

Mr Olmert has already announced that he will resign later this month because of the multiple corruption investigations he is facing.

He has consistently denied all the accusations against him.

Israel will have to reinstate pre-1967 border for peace deal, Olmert admits

By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem
Tuesday, 30 September 2008

The outgoing Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, has publicly acknowledged for the first time that "almost all" of the territory seized during the Six-Day War in 1967 will have to be given back in return for peace with the Palestinians.

In an interview with Israel's biggest-selling newspaper, Yedhiot Ahronot, in which he underlined the urgent need for an agreement to be reached while the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas remains in office, Mr Olmert warned that the alternative was "the very great danger that there will be a bloody clash, which will thwart any possibility of continuing negotiations".

Declaring that "what I am saying ... has not been said by any Israeli leader before me", Mr Olmert also went further than any member of his government in laying down some of the minimum requirements he believes he, or his successor will need to fulfil if there is to be a deal with Mr Abbas.

 -----------------------

Improvements...

Read more at The Independent and see toon at top...

From Chris Floyd

Already, Gaza has faded from the front pages of the Western press. Already it is yesterday's news, yesterday's massacre, just another in a long, long, endless line of human debauchery. After all, the Western press, the Western establishments, indeed, Western popular opinion, have often countenanced -- even championed -- far worse atrocities. The establishments and power structures of most Arab nations are also hastening to forget, to downplay, to bury, once again, the suffering of the Palestinians, in the interests of political gamesmanship, both domestic and diplomatic.The reality of the actual human beings in Palestine who have been inflicted with horrific suffering matter no more than the reality of the human beings in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Somalia, or Kurdistan, or Chechnya, or Colombia, or Sri Lanka, or Burma, or the Congo, or anywhere else on the far-flung earth where the machines of power wring the blood and terror that is their fuel from the flesh of men and women and children. (And this geography of suffering includes the sacred Homeland itself, of course, where, for example, more than two million citizens are now held in cages, most of them for the "crime" of temporarily deranging their senses to escape the pain of the world that power has made.)

see toon at top...

The Israeli defence ministry has concealed information about the extent of illegal settlement-building in the West Bank, a leading newspaper reports.

A classified database of construction compiled by the ministry was leaked to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

It suggests most construction took place without the right permits, and more than 30 settlements were built in part on land owned by Palestinians.

Settlements are a contentious issue in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The defence ministry has not commented on the report, which appears to contradict Israel's official position that it does not requisition private land for settlements.

The internationally-backed "road map" peace plan also calls on Israel to halt all settlement activity.

read more at the BBC and see the toon at top...

I don't want to brag... But look at my toon from 2007 at top (and below) and compare with this one ( 2012) from Toles, a cartoonist I do respect for his outstanding works...: