Posted on August 31st, 2009 by Marian Houk
The recent Fatah General Conference held in Bethlehem was very important, and the results were “good, but not excellent”, Shaath said. “You can’t get excellent results with a 20-year hiatus (from the last general conference)”. Shaath said “it was not really a coup d’etat … and not an indicator there was a revolt, [...]
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Filed under: Boundaries & Borders, Gaza, Israel, Middle East Peace Process, Negotiators and negotiations, Palestine & Palestinians
Posted on August 30th, 2009 by Marian Houk
The Washington Post, in an article published on Saturday, reported that “previously unpublicized details about the transformation, in 2005-2006, of the man known to U.S. officials as [Khalid Sheik Mohammed ] KSM [was transformed] from an avowed and truculent enemy of the United States into what the CIA called its ‘preeminent source’ on al-Qaeda. This [...]
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Filed under: Afghanistan, Guantanamo, Torture, USA
Posted on August 28th, 2009 by Marian Houk
For the first time in years, or perhaps ever, Palestinian traffic policemen were allowed to deploy up to the concrete barriers at the entry to the main Qalandia checkpoint today,
which Israeli officials refer to as a “border crossing”, on the road between Jerusalem and Ramallah.
It was a real departure on the first Friday in Ramadan [...]
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Filed under: Boundaries & Borders, Human Rights, International Humanitarian Law, Israel, Palestine & Palestinians
Posted on August 28th, 2009 by Marian Houk
One of the documents on interrogation techniques released this week in Washington [[see our previous post here ]] was an internal CIA report that, as AP says, describes “two instances in 2007 in which the CIA was allowed to exceed the guidelines set by Bush administration lawyers allowing prisoners to be kept awake for [...]
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Filed under: Afghanistan, Guantanamo, Human Rights, International Humanitarian Law, International Law, Torture
Posted on August 27th, 2009 by Marian Houk
John Sifton has just written in The Daily Beast that in the “Bush-era documents about the CIA’s detention and interrogation program”, just released by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Justice, “it’s difficult to know what they say: Many key sections of the most important documents contain heavy redactions”.
Nevertheless, Sifton, says. “There are [...]
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Filed under: Guantanamo, Human Rights, International Humanitarian Law, International Law, Torture
Posted on August 22nd, 2009 by Marian Houk
Today, the first day of Ramadan, I found writing (again) on my car — two lines written large in the dust that accumulated overnight on the windshield of the car I rent. The lines contained the word/name “Allah”, and looking like a verse from the Qur’an or a saying from the Hadith. [...]
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Filed under: Blogging, Human Rights, Israel, Journalism and Journalists, Palestine & Palestinians
Posted on August 21st, 2009 by Marian Houk
The UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) has classified Swine Flu — the H1N1 virus — as a “pandemic”.
A WHO “Call to Action” published a week ago stated that the pandemic is spreading rapidly, but its future evolution cannot be predicted. It advised governments to “plan for an additional 30 percent buffer stock of medical [...]
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Filed under: United Nations Agencies and Programmes
Posted on August 20th, 2009 by Marian Houk
It’s bad enough that the convoys of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, careen around the cities in the West Bank at 150 kilometers per hour, and that their security forces are posted every ten meters on the routes they are planning to take, and that they stop traffic coming anywhere [...]
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Filed under: Boundaries & Borders, Israel, Palestine & Palestinians
Posted on August 18th, 2009 by Marian Houk
Nabil Amr, who was spokesman for the Fatah Sixth General Conference held in Bethlehem from 4-14 August (more or less),has just resigned his posts as Palestinian Ambassador to Egypt and to the Arab League whose headquarters in Cairo, and also as head of the Fatah satellite television channel, Filastina, that he started in recent months [...]
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Filed under: Ambassadors and other diplomats, Egypt, Journalism and Journalists, Palestine & Palestinians
Posted on August 17th, 2009 by Marian Houk
Rabbi Arik Ascherman, an American-Israeli who is one of the founders of the Rabbis for Human Rights (RHR) Organization, was arrested last week during a candlelight solidarity vigil in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, protesting the recent evictions of some 53 UNRWA-registered Palestinian refugees whose homes are now occupied by Jewish settlers.
Rabbi Ascherman wrote that [...]
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Filed under: Boundaries & Borders, Human Rights, International Humanitarian Law, International Law, Israel, Palestine & Palestinians
