Nobel Peace Laureate Obama ordered raid that killed 49 Yemeni civilians

The following was reported on December 21, 2009; reposted here for background.

Following a military operation in Yemen targeting suspected al Qa'eda militants, a local official said on Sunday that 49 civilians, among them 23 children and 17 women, were killed in air strikes which he said were carried out "indiscriminately," Agence France Presse reported.

Earlier it had been reported by ABC News that on orders from the US President Barack Obama, the US military had launched cruise missiles in the attacks.

[...]

For a rather more discriminate retribution, Eight US CIA Officers are killed in a bomb attack, in Afghanistan: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8435502.stm. The Afghanistan CIA killings is a major blow to the US and its Middle-Eastern side-kick, Jordan: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8442473.stm

Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu arrested

Please note that any parallels to the Iranian situation will be regarded as anti-Semitic!

Lithuania, Poland and Romania hosted secret CIA prisons

Still no extraordinary renditions from the Kogalniceanu airport, Mr. Ba-se?

The December '89 Revolt and the Coup D'Etat in Romania

Having watched the film made by my colleague and friend (Valeriu Antonovici) http://filmandmemorii.blogspot.com/ on the 20th anniversary of the Romanian Revolutionary Coup d'état, I couldn't help but notice the sheer confusion surrounding those shady events today, same as it did back in December 1989, when I became involved as an extra - albeit one of the very first demonstrators to enter the Central Committee building (from the roof of which Ceausescu's helicopter was still struggling to take off!) and a member of the Provisory Council for National Salvation!...

Master-pupeteers, like Stanculescu, Magureanu or even Vlad, before he lost control of events, as some of the forces under his direct command continued to follow the orders assigned well before the coup unravelled, over a thousand people lost their lives as collateral victims of a puppet show gone horribly wrong. There's not a word today about the Western propaganda mouth-pieces, like The Voice of America or Radio Free Europe, which aided and abetted the plotters by disseminating false rumours, such as were those concerning a death-toll of 60000 (sixty thousand!) people in Timisoara, the place where the strangely tentative moves to suppress a minority supporting Lazlo Tokes, a Hungarian pastor, started a much larger protest that was to spread like wildfire and bring down Ceausescu's regime.

Yet, as people are prepared to spend their eternity in McDonalds, his film is a "timely" reminder of something that I, like many others who lost or nearly lost their lives back then, are still trying to forget... http://dialogicaluigiordanobruno.blogspot.com/2009/03/ratiunea-pasiunii-sau-negru-imaculat.html

Expelled Western Sahara activist Haidar allowed home

Rejoice dear friends... Aminatou Haidar, the Saharawi activist expelled by Morocco, has been allowed to return from Spain after maintaining a hunger strike for 32 days.

What do the rich give back to society?

As the rich are told they will pay most to repair the public finances after the recession, Michael Blastland, in his regular column, digs out a provocative fact about where the tax burden falls. But don't jump to any conclusions...

Unholy row over New Zealand Mary and Joseph billboard

Shingles bells, shingles bells, shingles all the way...

Israel fury at UK attempt to arrest Tzipi Livni

At long last...

Fresh evidence of Kosovo organ trafficking: Serb prosecutor

Remember this settling of Cold War scores? Redrawing Europe's borders to make a state that is big enough to accommodate the "natural growth" of the ethnic Albanian population? Clearly, this Serb prosecutor is just one of those day-dreaming nostalgics, as no one can investigate anything anymore in a sovereign, NATO member state...

For more on other controversial aspects of the commodification of the body, read Michael Anteby's piece: A Market for Human Cadavers in All but Name? http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6308.html

Blackwater Guards Tied to Secret C.I.A. Raids

A fascinating account of the Blackwater thugs on the CIA's payroll charged with enforcing "democracy" in Iraq and Afghanistan, on the front-page of the New York Times...

Obama award sad, says Northern Ireland's Nobel Prize winner

Nobel Peace Prize winner Mairead Corrigan Maguire has criticised the decision to give this year's award to US President Barack Obama.

Also, see Mehdi Hassan, Obama wins the Nobel Peace Prize. Is this a joke? http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/mehdi-hasan/2009/10/nobel-peace-prize-obama

For a full transcript and analysis of Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, see Paul Reynolds, BBC world affairs correspondent: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8406068.stm

EU: Jerusalem should be the capital of two states

The annexation of East Jerusalem by Israel, after the Six Day War of 1967, has never been internationally recognised. Yet, if "the Israelis have a right to live in Israel [and] the Palestinians have a right to live in Palestine", as Jean Asselborn, Luxembourg foreign minister argued, then East Jerusalem - home to Jewish, Muslim and Christian holy sites and the most intractable issue in this conflict - would have to be the capital of the Palestinian state, on its pre-1967 borders.

How the US "investigated" the Iraq war

The UK public inquiry into the Iraq war, which has just begun, follows a series of investigations by the US into the 2003 invasion...