Sim-O

Ynet:

A report by the Yesh Din organization found that in 2006, more than 99.7% of those accused are found guilty, some 95% of the cases end with a plea bargain and the average hearing is just two minutes long.

Yesh Din, which said that its inquiry was the first of its kind, found major failings in the court’s due process: Hearings were held in Hebrew and the Arabic-speaking suspects often did not understand the charges brought against them, they were unable to present a full defense or have an effective counsel.

“Most are detained in Israel and their attorneys are not able to meet them,” said Michael Sfard, Yesh Din’s legal counsel. In addition, minors were often tried as adults and detained at length before being charged. Sfard said the 0.29% acquittal rating in 2006 (23 out of 9,123) was most jarring.

Labels: Israel

Al Jazeera:

Abu Muhammad, a Baghdad resident, found it difficult to let go of his daughter’s hand but he had already convinced himself that selling her to a family outside Iraq would provide her with a better future.

“The war disgraced my family. I lost relatives including my wife among thousands of victims of sectarian violence and was forced to sell my daughter to give my other children something to eat,” he told Al Jazeera.

In 2006, Abu Muhammad and his family were forced to leave their home in Adhamiya, a district of Baghdad, after militia fighting claimed the streets in his once tranquil neighbourhood.

They began living in a makeshift refugee camp on the outskirts of Baghdad, but he soon lost his job and the children, unable to make the daily trek, quit school.

Somehow, I can’t shake the feeling that we share a lot of the responsibility for this.

How are you getting on with your MP? They’re back at work tomorrow.

Labels: Iraq

BBC report (video)

The Japanese are whaling in the Antarctic. Greenpeace is out there trying to fond them so they can get between the whalers and the whales and hope that the Japanese do not go through them to get to the whales.
The Japanese say they are killing whales for scientific purposes.
What scientific purposes? What world changing discoveries has come from these studies of dead whales? Is it really necessary to kill these whale in this day and age?

Labels: Environment

Every one’s posting about this story.
I saw it last night and thought “tell me something I don’t know”.

Labels: Surveillance

Come on. Just die you fucker.

Labels: Israel

Ha’aretz:

There is no Israeli whose presence in the West Bank is neutral. Civilian or armed, soldier or woman settler, resident of a quality-of-life settlement or a nearby outpost, MahsomWatch activist or guest at a settlement, Bezek worker or client at a Palestinian garage. All of them, all of us, are in this Palestinian territory, in the West Bank, because our state occupied it in 1967.

The presence of every Israeli in the West Bank is based on a regime of privilege that developed out of that primary act of occupation. We have the privilege of hiking in Palestinian areas to our heart’s content, of buying subsidized housing for Jews only on the lands of Bethlehem, of raising cherries and grapes in the wadis of Hebron, of quarrying on the mountain slopes, of driving on roads whose land was expropriated from the indigenous inhabitants for public use.

The Palestinians, in contrast to us, not only are not allowed to move from Hebron to Tel Aviv, because they like the sea, for example; they are not even allowed to visit the lands and homes their family owned before 1948, nor are they allowed to tour Galilee and visit relatives. The regime of travel permits that has been in place since 1991 deprives all Palestinians of the right to freedom of movement in Israel while the system of roadblocks limits their movement in their own territories.
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The right to travel the land is a basic human right, and like any right, when it is not universal, it is a mutilated right, that is, it becomes a privilege. That is a fact, even if most Israelis repress or ignore it. Our presence in the Palestinian territories, which is based on military and political superiority, is therefore violent and arrogant by its very nature, even when it is expressed in pleasant ways, like cultivating gardens in settlements or taking a pre-Shabbat hike.

Read the rest

Labels: Israel, Palestine

Asia Times:

Sri Lanka’s long-dead ceasefire has been formally buried. The Lankan government announced its withdrawal from the 2002 ceasefire agreement on Wednesday, paving the way for a no-holds-barred fight between government forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
…
Over 5,000 people have died in the past two years of “ceasefire”, taking the death toll since the war erupted in 1983 to around 70,000. On the ground, the ceasefire had ceased to exist since end-2005. But it continued to hold on paper.
…
Sources in the Lankan government told Asia Times Online that the government’s decision to call off the ceasefire at this juncture was prompted by the series of victories that the Lankan military has scored against the LTTE in recent months. “Emboldened by these military successes, the government has decided to push for a fight to the finish,” a Defense Ministry official said. “Military defeat of the LTTE seems within reach and the government would like to go for it,” he said.
…
“The military seems to believe its own propaganda,” said a Tamil political analyst who did not want to be named. “The LTTE will slip into guerrilla warfare and bleed the government, as it has done in the past.”

Labels: Sri Lanka

Mark Steel:

As with most of his decisions, it’s doubtful whether this conversion is due to a seriously held conviction. For example, if he’s a devoted Catholic, why did he and Cherie undergo a rebirthing in Mexico in 2001, described in The Times thus: “Mr Blair and his wife, wearing bathing costumes, were led to the Temazcal, a brick-coloured pyramid… They were told the Temazcal was like the womb and those participating in the ritual must confront their hopes and fears before venturing outside… The Blairs were offered watermelon and papaya, thentold to smear what they did not eat over each other’s bodiesalong with mud from the Mayan jungle.”

So at that point Blair seems to have looked at Catholicism, with its insistence that we’re all born with stained souls due to Eve being persuaded to eat an apple by a talking snake, and its belief that through a weekly offering you’re accepting the blood and body of Jesus, and he’s said: “The problem with this religion is it’s not mad enough for me.”

Labels: Blair

The Guardian:

Barack Obama swept away any sense of inevitability about Hillary Clinton’s march to the White House last night, scoring an upset victory in the Iowa caucuses that dramatically alters the Democratic race.

It’s only the first result, so it could all change. But it’s still a good start.

Labels: Politix, USA

W00t!!!1!!

Got trackbacks again, not just those crapy blogger (back?)links

Labels: Blogging