Iqra

Checkmate! :!!!:

Israel has issued a warning for hundreds of Palestinians to evacuate east Jerusalem (al-Quds) before demolishing their homes in the area. "The owners of 80 houses in the al-Bustan neighborhood have received eviction notices saying that the structures will be destroyed because they are illegal," said Hatem Abdel Kader, an official responsible for the city's affairs in the Palestinian government. Kader told AFP that "The (Jerusalem) municipality used this as a pretext to issue the demolition orders despite appeals by the residents." He said that several of the houses served with demolition orders were built before 1967, when Israel captured east al-Quds during the Six Day War but that numerous extensions have been built since. "The reason (for the notices) is not legal, but political," he said. "Israel wants to create a demographic disequilibrium in the city." This is while a Palestinian resident said he received a demolition notice after failing to get a building permit from the Israeli authorities. "I built my house a year and a half ago," he said. "I asked for a permit but never received authorization." Israeli authorities have reportedly demolished some 350 houses in the neighborhood since 2004 under the same pretext. http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=86477...ionid=351020202

An 11-year-old boy shot his father's pregnant girlfriend in the back of the head while she was in bed, then got on the school bus, authorities said. Jordan Brown, of Wampum, Pennsylvania, was charged on Saturday as an adult with murdering Kenzie Marie Houk, who was eight months pregnant, and her unborn baby, Lawrence County District Attorney John Bongivengo said. The charges were criminal homicide and criminal homicide of an unborn child. The fifth-grader was picked up from school on Friday by Pennsylvania State Police, who found Ms Houk's body at the farmhouse where she lived, about 35 miles north west of Pittsburgh, after her four-year-old daughter told tree cutters on the property that she thought her mother was dead, Mr Bongivengo said. Brown told police there was a suspicious black truck on the property that morning, causing investigators to look into a false lead for about five hours. But inconsistencies in the boy's description of the vehicle led police to reinterview the victim's seven-year-old daughter, who implicated the boy, Mr Bongivengo said. "She didn't actually eyewitness the shooting. She saw him with what she believed to be a shotgun and heard a loud bang," he said, adding that the weapon, a youth model 20-gauge shotgun, was found in what police believed was the boy's bedroom. The shotgun, which apparently belonged to Brown, is designed for children and such weapons do not have to be registered. Brown's lawyer, Dennis Elisco, said the evidence pointed to the gunshot wound being "consistent" with the boy's hunting gun, but he wanted to see stronger proof. I believe Jordan did not do this and I'm looking forward to seeing the physical evidence to see if it matches with what I think happened," he said. The lawyer also said he met the boy's father, Christopher Brown, and planned to file a motion to have the boy released on bail and move the case to juvenile court. http://news.uk.msn.com/world/article.aspx?...&ocid=today

When I returned from the war in Vietnam, I wrote a film script as an antidote to the myth that the war had been an ill-fated noble cause. The producer David Puttnam took the draft to Hollywood and offered it to the major studios, whose responses were favourable – well, almost. Each issued a report card in which the final category, “politics”, included comments such as: “This is real, but are the American people ready for it? Maybe they’ll never be.” By the late 1970s, Hollywood judged Americans ready for a different kind of Vietnam movie. The first was The Deer Hunter which, according to Time, “articulates the new patriotism”. The film celebrated immigrant America, with Robert de Niro as a working class hero (“liberal by instinct”) and the Vietnamese as sub-human Oriental barbarians and idiots, or “gooks”. The dramatic peak was reached during recurring orgiastic scenes in which GIs were forced to play Russian roulette by their Vietnamese captors. This was made up by the director Michael Cimino, who also made up a story that he had served in Vietnam. “I have this insane feeling that I was there,” he said. “Somehow … the line between reality and fiction has become blurred.” The Deer Hunter was regarded virtually as documentary by ecstatic critics. “The film that could purge a nation’s guilt!” said the Daily Mail. President Jimmy Carter was reportedly moved by its “genuine American message”. Catharsis was at hand. The Vietnam movies became a revisionist popular history of the great crime in Indo-China. That more than four million people had died terribly and unnecessarily and their homeland poisoned to a wasteland was not the concern of these films. Rather, Vietnam was an “American tragedy”, in which the invader was to be pitied in a blend of false bravado-and-angst: sometimes crude (the Rambo films) and sometimes subtle (Oliver Stone’s Platoon). What mattered was the strength of the purgative. None of this, of course, was new; it was how Hollywood created the myth of the Wild West, which was harmless enough unless you happened to be a native-American; and how the Second World War has been relentlessly glorified, which may be harmless enough unless you happen to be one of countless innocent human beings, from Serbia to Iraq, whose deaths or dispossession are justified by moralising references to 1939-45. Hollywood’s gooks, its Untermenschen, are essential to this crusade -- the dispatched Somalis in Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down and the sinister Arabs in movies like Rendition, in which the torturing CIA is absolved by Jake Gyllenhal’s good egg. As Robbie Graham and Mark Alford pointed out in their New Statesman enquiry into corporate control of the cinema (2 February), in 167 minutes of Steven Spielberg’s Munich, the Palestinian cause is restricted to just two and a half minutes. “Far from being an ‘even-handed cry for peace’, as one critic claimed,” they wrote, “Munich is more easily interpreted as a corporate-backed endorsement of Israeli policy.” With honourable exceptions, film critics rarely question this and identify the true power behind the screen. Obsessed with celebrity actors and vacuous narratives, they are the cinema’s lobby correspondents, its dutiful press corps. Emitting safe snipes and sneers, they promote a deeply political system that dominates most of what we pay to see, knowing not what we are denied. Brian de Palma’s 2007 film Redacted shows an Iraq the media does not report. He depicts the homicides and gang-rapes that are never prosecuted and are the essence of any colonial conquest. In the New York Village Voice, the critic Anthony Kaufman, in abusing the “divisive” De Palma for his “perverse tales of voyeurism and violence”, did his best to taint the film as a kind of heresy and to bury it. In this way, the “war on terror” – the conquest and subversion of resource rich regions of the world, whose ramifications and oppressions touch all our lives – is almost excluded from the popular cinema. Michael Moore’s outstanding Fahrenheit 911 was a freak; the notoriety of its distribution ban by the Walt Disney Company helped to force its way into cinemas. My own 2007 film The War on Democracy, which inverted the “war on terror” in Latin America, was distributed in Britain, Australia and other countries but not in the United States. “You will need to make structural and political changes,” said a major New York distributor. “Maybe get a star like Sean Penn to host it – he likes liberal causes -- and tame those anti-Bush sequences.” During the cold war, Hollywood’s state propaganda was unabashed. The classic 1957 dance movie, Silk Stockings, was an anti-Soviet diatribe interrupted by the fabulous footwork of Cyd Charisse and Fred Astaire. These days, there are two types of censorship. The first is censorship by introspective dross. Betraying its long tradition of producing gems, escapist Hollywood is consumed by the corporate formula: just make ‘em long and asinine and hope the hype will pay off. Ricky Gervais is his clever comic self in Ghost Town, while around him stale, formulaic characters sentimentalise the humour to death. These are extraordinary times. Vicious colonial wars and political, economic and environmental corruption cry out for a place on the big screen. Yet, try to name one recent film that has dealt with these, honestly and powerfully, let alone satirically.. Censorship by omission is virulent. We need another Wall Street, another Last Hurrah, another Dr. Strangelove. The partisans who tunnel out of their prison in Gaza, bringing in food, clothes, medicines and weapons with which to defend themselves, are no less heroic than the celluloid-honoured POWs and partisans of the 1940s. They and the rest of us deserve the respect of the greatest popular medium. www.johnpilger.com http://www.almanar.com.lb/NewsSite/NewsDet...amp;language=en

US forces in Afghanistan confirm that 13 civilians and only 3 militants were killed in an operation originally meant to eradicate insurgents. The US military at first had said that 15 militants were killed in air strikes in the western province of Herat late Monday. However, local officials later objected, saying that six women and two children were among the dead. Following the claim, a team of Afghan and coalition troops visited the site and launched an investigation. "Coalition forces confirmed three militants and 13 non-combatants were killed during a coalition forces' operation near Gozara district, Herat province, February 17," the coalition said in a statement, which did not identify the deceased. "We expressed our deepest condolences to the survivors of the non-combatants who were killed during this operation," said US Brigadier General Michael Ryan. Civilian casualties have been a major source of tension between Kabul and Washington, which leads the foreign force in Afghanistan. The US-led forces, among other troops, are under scrutiny because of their 'disregard for civilian lives', which has resulted in public outrage and has flamed anti-US sentiments. The United Nations said this week that more than 2,000 civilians were killed in insurgency-linked violence last year, the highest civilian death toll since the 2001 ouster of the Taliban. http://www.presstv.ir/Detail.aspx?id=86378...ionid=351020403

Agents in Britain's MI5 and MI6 services have reportedly assisted Pakistan's intelligence in torturing terrorist suspects. According to a shocking report conducted by Human Rights Watch, there is a widespread complicity between UK intelligence officials and their Pakistani counterparts in torturing and interrogating British terrorist suspects held in Pakistan. The report says the suspects were first tortured by Pakistani secret service agents and subsequently questioned by UK intelligence officials adding that different agents were deployed to interview different suspects. "The suspects go through these torture sessions by the Pakistani agencies, then the British interview the suspects. The suspects then go back into custody. They are then beaten and tortured and then more questions are asked by the British agents", a senior official with HRW said. Pakistani intelligence officials told HRW that they tortured British terror suspects before being interviewed by MI5 and MI6 officers, confirming that British intelligence knew suspects were being maltreated. "Of course they [the British] knew that we were beating them up, hanging them upside down and whipping them. That's what we do", one Pakistani agent said. The HRW report, due next month, adds that British officials had provided Pakistani intelligence with key questions when interrogating suspects under duress. "Our new report will provide greater detail of what amounts to torture and British awareness and effective complicity in the torture of suspects", the HRW official added. The international non-government organization says it was convinced that Britain was 'outsourcing torture'. "The British questions form part of the violent process. They are aware the suspects are injured, they fail to take notice of this. They put forward questions as part of this process. At no time are the British agencies seen torturing directly. But we believe it amounts to the outsourcing of torture.' The report is expected to increase the pressure on Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who has repeatedly said that Britain does not condone torture. http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=86445...ionid=351020601

Are you gonna' bark all day, little doggy, or are you gonna' bite?

^There may be, but to be honest bro - there couldn't possibly be a comparison being made that wasn't subjective. I'd suggest actually doing the research yourself rather than looking for summaries from people who have their own agenda. Have you read any risalahs yet? Good luck by the way!

http://www.shiachat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=1797 http://www.shiachat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=71812

I once even read on another forum that Hezbollah should be helping Muslims in Chinese provinces..there is no pleasing some people. If Sayyed Nasrallah cured cancer, certain Muslims would ask why he didn't cure AIDS..

Paris warns Tel Aviv against insisting on a deal with Hamas to release abducted Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit before easing Gaza blockade. French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner on Friday said that the French government supports an Egyptian proposal for a truce between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Paris believes it is unnecessary to link Shalit with any cease-fire deal. The two issues should be worked out simultaneously but the one should not be conditioned on the other, said Kouchner. He also confirmed that France and the Palestinian side have been holding indirect negotiations mediated by Syria, Qatar and Norway. Earlier it was reported that French President President Nicholas Sarkozy was in talks with officials from the three countries to help release Shalit, who holds French citizenship. Israel refuses to lift its crippling siege on Gaza, waiting for an answer from Hamas and Egypt on a proposal for talks in Cairo on a new list of Palestinian prisoners to be released in return for Shalit. On Thursday, outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert confirmed its readiness to release "hundreds" of Palestinians on the condition that Hamas frees Gilad Shalit. However, he conditioned the opening of the Rafah border crossing on the release of the captive Israeli soldier. Hamas maintains it would release Shalit in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners whose names have been delivered to Israeli officials. The Islamic movement says the case of Shalit should remain separate from that of the ceasefire talks, adding that in case of a truce Tel Aviv should lift its 19-month blockade of the Gaza Strip. http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=86268...ionid=351020202

Satyaban? Where you at?

Claro :)

Pardon my ignorance - but I don't get it. Are you trying to say that they are agents of the Americans, or that they're not? Because there was nothing in those mini-biographies which would indicate that they were US agents.