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Israel Stops Palestinian Freedom Flotilla
Newsweek reports Tuesday: “Boat Carrying Wounded Palestinians Breaks Gaza Blockade, Gets Towed to Israel.” AP reported late last week: “Israel’s supreme court rejects human rights group’s request to declare it unlawful for soldiers to shoot at unarmed civilians.” Abusaid, Tayeh and Bailey are with the group We Are Not Numbers. The group tweeted: “Update on the Al-Hurriyeh (Liberty) boat: Of the 17 passengers, 4 are crew, 2 unemployed students, 2 injured protesters, 2 deaf (seeking treatment), & the rest are ill with cancer/similar serious diseases. The boat was shelled & they are in Ashdod.”
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Poor People’s Campaign and Military Spending
“The Pentagon says the war in Afghanistan will cost us $45 billion this year alone. If we didn’t spend that money on an unwinnable war thousands of miles away, what could we do with it instead? “For starters, we could hire 556,779 well-paid elementary school teachers in struggling states like Oklahoma, Kentucky and West Virginia, where teachers have protested abysmal conditions. Or create 809,999 new well-paid jobs to rebuild infrastructure like the broken water system in Flint, Michigan.”
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* Korea Policy: Disarm, Then Attack? * Saudi Bombing Yemen
“As Yemeni civilians’ lives become increasingly desperate, they become increasingly isolated, their suffering made invisible by a near-total lack of Western media interest or attention. No commercial flights are allowed into the Sana’a airport, so media teams and human rights documentarians can’t enter the areas of Yemen most afflicted by airstrikes. The World Food Program (WFP) organizes a weekly flight into Sana’a, but the WFP must vet passengers with the Saudi government.”
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Is U.S. Meddling in Venezuela?
“Our delegation observed four different polling stations [Sunday]. All were compliant with CNE [National Electoral Council] specifications. Not all parties were present at every center as opposition parties failed to recruit and send enough witnesses to polls we observed. The day was slow compared to prior years I have observed. CNE reported 46 percent turnout among eligible voters. It was clear throughout the day the opposition parties were not participating. Non-participation does not equate to ‘unfair’ or ‘unfree.’ Non-participation was an individual choice and political strategy at large.”
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Israeli and Gulf Collusion with Trump Team
“Michael Flynn plead guilty to lying to the FBI about his efforts with Jared Kushner to torpedo a United Nations Security Council resolution criticizing Israeli settlements. These included lobbying the Russian ambassador to help in this campaign by delaying or cancelling a vote on the matter.”
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50 Years After Catonsville: “Resistance Needed to End Empire”
“The best we can do is to encourage each other to muster the resistance needed to end empire. Nuclear weapons threaten us with omnicide, but that’s only part of it. Nuclear weapons kill every day by their mere existence — we see the billions of dollars it takes to build and maintain the Trident system as stolen resources.”
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Israel, Religious Bigotry and Liberation
“On this day 70 years ago, Israel began its ethnic cleansing campaign against more than 400 Palestinian villages, displacing over 700,000 people. As the names of those murdered in Gaza yesterday by Israeli snipers continue to grow we, as Palestinian Christians, remember: ‘Thou shalt not kill’ (Exodus 20:13). Zionist forces engaged in at least two dozen massacres of Palestinian civilians during the Nakba. ‘Thou shalt not steal’ (Exodus 20:15). More than 400 Palestinian villages and towns were systematically destroyed, displacing more than 700,000 people.”
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As U.S. Moves Embassy, Israel Massacres Palestinians
Israeli attacks on nonviolent protests there have resulted in at least 37 Palestinians killed today. He adds that medical personnel are now reporting that Israel is using fragmentation ammunition, which breaks up on impact, resulting in gun wounds as large as fists. Israeli soldiers are “picking people off with sniper fire.” Kouddous also reports on the Palestinian resistance using kites and balloons and how it is setting fire to tires in an attempt to block the view of the Israeli snipers who are targeting people.
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Billionaires Fueling Trump on Iran Deal, Jerusalem Move
“The move “may have been exactly what two of Trump’s biggest donors, Sheldon Adelson and Bernard Marcus, and what one of his biggest inaugural supporters, Paul Singer, paid for when they threw their financial weight behind Trump. Marcus and Adelson, who are also board members of the Likudist Republican Jewish Coalition, have already received substantial returns on their investment: total alignment by the U.S. behind Israel, next week’s move of the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and the official dropping of ‘occupied territories’ to describe the West Bank and East Jerusalem.”
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Fueling More Syria War: * Nixing Iran Deal and More Israeli Attacks * Pollack and Pundit Class
“Pollack suggests ‘ramping up American covert assistance to the Syrian opposition to try to bleed the Assad regime and its Iranian backers over time, exactly the way that the United States backed the Afghan Mujahideen as they bled the Soviets in Afghanistan — or as the Russians and Chinese did to the United States in Vietnam.'”
Blog
“With a tiny staff, it has managed to place on the air and in newspapers, points of view otherwise excluded from the national debate.”
Howard Zinn