The day of the Nakba 2015

Palestinians participate in a march to commemorate the ‘Nakba Day’ in the West Bank city of Ramallah, May 13, 2015. Photo by AFP

Israel continues to criminalise marking Nakba Day

Activists now face difficulty in commemorating Palestinian dispossession during Israel’s founding due to Israeli law.

By Patrick Strickland, Al Jazeera

May 14, 2015

Haifa – Each year on May 15, Palestinians across the world commemorate the Nakba (catastrophe), or the 1948 establishment of Israel that led to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians being displaced from their homeland.

The estimated 1.7 million Palestinians who carry Israeli citizenship and live in villages, towns and cities across the country are no exception. Each year, protests, marches, lectures and other events to mourn their ancestors’ dispossession are held in Palestinian communities across Israel.

Yet, since 2011, Israeli legislation has made mourning the Nakba publicly difficult for Palestinians and others in Israel. The “Nakba Law” authorises Israel’s finance minister to revoke funding from institutions that reject Israel’s character as a “Jewish state” or mark the country’s Independence Day as a day of mourning.

Although the Nakba Law has yet to be technically implemented, human rights groups and activists say it has a dangerous deterrent effect and is meant to intimidate Palestinians and others who view Israel’s establishment as a day of mourning for Palestinians.

The Roots of Inequality for Ethiopian Israelis

Lia Tarachansky (speaker) is an Israeli-Russian journalist and documentary filmmaker who previously reported for The Real News Network on Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. Born in the Soviet Union, Tarachansky grew up in a settlement in the occupied West Bank.

Full Script here : http://goo.gl/yIzbm3

Al Jazeera Investigates - Informants

Published on 20 Jul 2014 | Al Jazeera's Investigative Unit takes you inside the shadowy world of FBI informants and counterterrorism sting operations. Following the 9/11 attacks, the FBI set about to recruit a network of more than 15,000 informants. Al Jazeera's investigative film tells the stories of three paid FBI informants who posed as Muslims as they searched for people interested in joining violent plots concocted by the FBI.

Bibi's bullshit!

Do We Want A Jewish State? | a reminder from Brother Nathanael

Hollywood, 'Woefully Out of Touch', too few women involved & exposed!

AP Photo/Reed Saxon

Onscreen and off, minorities and women are drastically underrepresented — even at a cost to ratings and box office — according to a new report, which targets talent agencies, Oscars and Emmys, among others.

A UCLA study released Wednesday slammed the entertainment industry for its persistent and dramatic underrepresentation of minorities and women onscreen and behind the scenes, with the study’s chief author telling The Hollywood Reporter in an interview that “there are a lot of industries that do a better job than Hollywood” in forging workforces that reflect the nation’s diversity.

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The Pathology of the Rich

- Chris Hedges on Reality Asserts Itself (1/2)

Published on 5 Dec 2013 | with Paul Jay, Chris Hedges discusses the psychology of the super rich; their sense of entitlement, the dehumanization of workers, and mistaken belief that their wealth will insulate them from the coming storms

100,000 overseas Filipino workers in Saudi face jail, deportation?

P2 billion reintegration fund ready for OFWs - Palace

MANILA -- The government is ready to assist Filipinos who have yet to come home from Saudi Arabia as a result of an immigration law.

An analyst, however, fears more than 100,000 overseas Filipino workers could be arrested if they are found to be working with employers other than their original visa sponsors.

Lito Soriano, a migration and recruitment consultant, said the Saudi government is bent on weeding out undocumented OFWs and other expatriates because of the so-called “Saudization.”

Citing a Commission on Overseas Filipinos data, Soriano said there are around 108,000 irregular or undocumented Filipinos in Saudi Arabia as of December 2012.

The Saudi king has yet to respond to a letter of Vice President Jejomar Binay seeking another extension of the four-month grace period given in July. The amnesty period, which allows foreign nationals to correct their statuses or return to their home countries, lapses on November 3.

Soriano said the Ministry of Labor there has already ruled out an extension. Countrywide raids are expected on November 4, he said.

“The inspection of commercial premises will begin on Monday as planned. Various arms of the ministry are ready for the inspections. The government agencies, however, will not arrest those holding relevant documents and waiting to legalize their status or be repatriated,” he said.

In an interview on radio dzRB, Communications Secretary Herminio Coloma, Jr. assured the OFWs and their families that the government is already doing what it can to help in repatriation proceedings.

He said a total of 9,000 have been given travel documents, while some 1,500 are still waiting for their clearances from the immigration office.

According to Coloma, around 4,371 OFWs have already returned home ever since the new immigration law has been implemented.

“We will be giving them all the legal, financial and other necessary assistance,” Coloma said, adding that a P2-billion reintegration fund under the Department of Labor and Employment is readily available for the Filipinos.

Otherwise, the effect of the Saudization will be minimal since some of the Filipinos have already found other jobs, he said.

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Following Nationwide Strikes, Bangladesh Garment Workers Win Minimum Wage Increase

Published on 21 Oct 2013 | Striking Bangladesh garment workers closed 20% of the country's garment production to achieve victory.

See more videos: http://therealnews.com

David Cameron's gunning for The Guardian.

Grilling Guardian: 'Cameron declares war on investigative journalism'?

Published on Oct 17, 2013 | The British Prime Minister has called for an investigation into whether the Guardian newspaper broke the law - by publishing the Edward Snowden leaks that sent shockwaves about American surveillance worldwide. A parliamentary committee is now looking into it.

Bilderberg Conference Convenes

Heery Kravis, head of KKR, an “equity acquisition firm,” and king of the LBO game. Few represent the capitalist disease as well as Kravis.

On June 5, the London Evening Standard headlined “No minutes, no press conferences – just the world’s power brokers chewing the fat on the issues of the day. It’s the Bilderberg conference – and it’s coming to a suburb near you.”

Making fun of 'stiff upper lips'?

What kind of Asian are you?

New US Congress is Most Diverse in History

Published on 5 Dec 2012 by VOAvideo : New US legislators - those taking office for the first time in January - are more diverse than at any other time in U.S. history. Barriers have been broken on ethnicity, sexual orientation and religion. In fact, among the 200 Democratic representatives, women and those of various minorities will outnumber straight white males. VOA's Carolyn Presutti introduces us to a few of the history-making lawmakers in a Congress that will more closely reflect the people who live in the United States.

Tens of thousands rally for Argentina's biggest protest in years.

09 November, 2012

Thousands of pot-banging, flag-waving, banner-hoisting demonstrators massed in Buenos Aires for Argentina’s largest anti-government protest in years. Common themes at the protest included the nation's high levels of crime, corruption and inflation.

The demonstration, which lasted nearly four hours, was aimed at the government of President Cristina Fernandez de Kircher. Police officials said at least 30,000 people participated, while local media reported that hundreds of thousands turned out. Protesters angry at the nation’s current state banged pots and pans as Argentinians young and old rallied until almost midnight.

A column of demonstrators carried a 200-meter-long flag. As they marched through the city, they were greeted with noisy pans, tambourines, and honking car horns. Protesters chanted, “We’re not afraiid!" as they swarmed into the Plaza de Mayo and surrounding area, right in front of the presidential palace.

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Occupy Wall Street: The Future And History, So Far

February 9, 2012 : On September 17, 2011, hundreds of people gathered in Lower Manhattan to protest the growing wealth gap and Wall Street's involvement in the economic crisis. Five months later, most of the Occupy encampments across the country have been disbanded and the future of the movement remains uncertain.

Silencing the messenger / whistle blower!

Greece arrests editor for 'Lagarde list' leak | Published on Oct 28, 2012 by AlJazeeraEnglish : Greek police arrested the editor of a weekly magazine for publishing a list of more than 2,000 names of wealthy Greeks who have placed money in Swiss bank accounts, police said.

The so-called "Lagarde List", which led to the arrest of editor Costas Vaxevanis on Sunday, was given to Greece by French authorities in 2010 with names to be probed for possible tax evasion - has been a topic of heated speculation in the Greek media. It is named after International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde, who was French finance minister when the list was handed over.

London: Thousands take part in anti-austerity protest.

Published on Oct 20, 2012 by Euronews : Nurses, cleaners and ambulance drivers have joined thousands of other demonstrators in London, to vent their anger over public spending cuts and tax hikes. They claim austerity is not working in Britain and are calling on the government to do more to revive the country's struggling economy.

Meet Romney’s Economic Hit Man

Mark the name of R. Glenn Hubbard, the man who will make your life miserable if Mitt Romney is elected president. Unless, that is, you happen to be one of the swindlers who has profited mightily from the nation’s economic pain. Then George W. Bush’s Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers R. Glenn Hubbard in 2001. (AP/J. Scott Applewhite)

Hubbard is the ideological hit man instrumental in justifying the mortgage derivatives bubble that caused the Great Recession during the George W. Bush years. He now serves as Romney’s key economic adviser and is the front-runner to be the next Treasury secretary should the Republican win.

“Romney’s Go-To Economist” read the headline on a New York Timesprofile of the dean of Columbia University’s Business School, which notes that “During a stint as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers for President George W. Bush, from 2001 to 2003, Mr. Hubbard was known as the principal architect of the Bush tax cuts.” In that capacity, and after returning to Columbia, Hubbard was also the chief cheerleader for a runaway derivatives market that spiraled out of control and left the Great Recession in its wake.

While pocketing millions in fees from the financial industry that he was ostensibly studying as a neutral academic, Hubbard was an enthusiastic backer of the virtues of a burgeoning unregulated capital market that sold toxic derivatives to the world. In a landmark paper that he co-wrote in November 2004 with William C. Dudley, at the time the chief U.S. economist at Goldman Sachs, it was asserted, “The capital markets have helped facilitate a major transformation of the U.S. mortgage financing system over the past 25 years. … The result has been a dramatic decline in the cyclical volatility of housing activity.” 

Their study was published by the Global Markets Institute of Goldman Sachs at the very time that Goldman, a leader in the capital market, was packaging and selling some of the toxic mortgage-based derivatives that would come close to destroying the world’s economy.

Hubbard’s article celebrated this “revolution in housing finance (that) has led to a large increase in mortgage equity withdrawal.” It extolled the madcap equity lending as “one reason why consumer spending held up well during the 2001-2003 period, even as employment and investment spending faltered.” 

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'Free speech? Let Obama talk to Bradley Manning about it'

Published on Sep 25, 2012 by RussiaToday : Barack Obama stated US won't block anti-Islam film for reasons of free speech. RT discussed Obama's speech in UN with journalist and anti-war activist Don DeBar.

UK housing collapse to leave 1.7 million families homeless

Published on Sep 16, 2012 by RussiaToday : Britain's suffering its worst housing crisis in modern history - with the number of new households increasing faster than the number of homes it can build. Over 1.7 million families are waiting for a place to live.

Poor In India Starve As Politicians Steal $14.5 Billion Of Food

Sanjit Das/Bloomberg

52-year-old Ram Kishen with his government provided ration card in Satnapur Village, Uttar Pradesh, India.

Ram Kishen, 52, half-blind and half- starved, holds in his gnarled hands the reason for his hunger: a tattered card entitling him to subsidized rations that now serves as a symbol of India’s biggest food heist.

Kishen has had nothing from the village shop for 15 months. Yet 20 minutes’ drive from Satnapur, past bone-dry fields and tiny hamlets where children with distended bellies play, a government storage facility five football fields long bulges with wheat and rice. By law, those 57,000 tons of food are meant for Kishen and the 105 other households in Satnapur with ration books. They’re meant for some of the 350 million families living below India’s poverty line of 50 cents a day.

Instead, as much as $14.5 billion in food was looted by corrupt politicians and their criminal syndicates over the past decade in Kishen’s home state of Uttar Pradesh alone, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The theft blunted the country’s only weapon against widespread starvation -- a five-decade-oldpublic distribution system that has failed to deliver record harvests to the plates of India’s hungriest.

“This is the most mean-spirited, ruthlessly executed corruption because it hits the poorest and most vulnerable in society,” said Naresh Saxena, who, as a commissioner to the nation’sSupreme Court, monitors hunger-based programs across the country. “What I find even more shocking is the lack of willingness in trying to stop it.”

Unpunished

This scam, like many others involving politicians in India, remains unpunished. A state police force beholden to corrupt lawmakers, an underfunded federal anti-graft agency and a sluggish court system have resulted in five overlapping investigations over seven years -- and zero convictions.

India has run the world’s largest public food distribution system for the poor since the failure of two successive monsoons led to the creation of the Food Corporation of India in 1965. The government last year spent a record $13 billion buying and storing commodities such as wheat and rice, and expects that figure to grow this year.

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