1. “A New Study of the Seismic Signals on September 11, 2001 in New York
Seismic Signals Reveal Explosives Were Used at the WTC on 9/11, according to geophysicist André Rousseau”
2. “7 Questions for Defenders of Israel’s Inhumane Siege of Gaza
The Gaza blockade has nothing to do with Israel defending itself.”
http://www.alternet.org/world/147132/7_questions_for_defenders_of_israel%27s_inhumane_siege_of_gaza/
3. “US places No. 85 — behind Libya — in Global Peace Index
Given the criteria, the US not surprisingly comes up as “less peaceful” than countries like Austria and Costa Rica, but it also trails Libya, Cuba, and Equatorial Guinea.
“We work with a definition of peace that is not as the opposite of war but the absence of violence,” says Clyde McConaghy, board director of the Institute for Economics and Peace – the Sydney, Australia, think tank that amasses the information behind the Global Peace Index, or GPI. Weighing 23 factors ranging from domestic instability to militarization, the GPI “provides a snapshot of relative peacefulness among nations,” he adds.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Foreign-Policy/2010/0608/US-places-No.-85-behind-Libya-in-Global-Peace-Index
4. “The things driving this legal advice or fatwa are first of all that Saudis mostly practice the Wahhabi form of Islam and people in the Arabian Peninsula generally tend to be more strict about the notion of gender segregation. Segregating women from unrelated males and having them veil when they go out of the house is not in the Qur’an and historians think they are customs adopted into early Islam by the Arab aristocracy from the Byzantines and ancient Iranians. The Qur’an just says a woman should cover her charms (zinah), and I suspect women in ancient pagan Arabia, where it is very hot, went about as those in some parts of subsaharan Africa still do, with very little clothing on, and the Qur’an just wanted them to cover up a bit. There is no mention in it of a face veil or even headscarf per se. And the only mention of anything like seclusion concerns the Prophet’s wives, and cannot be taken to refer to all Muslim women (in fact early Muslims would have probably thought it blasphemous to put ordinary women in that legal category).
Most Muslim women in history never veiled or were secluded. Pastoral nomads were a significant proportion of most Middle Eastern societies, and their women rode camels and horses outside during migrations to where the pasturage popped up. And peasant women worked the fields and could not be secluded or mostly afford to veil. Only in the past two centuries has veiling and sometimes seclusion been adopted in some Muslim countries as a sign of upward mobility (since these were aristocratic customs they are ways of putting on airs if you bet better off some year).”
http://www.juancole.com/
5. “Israel’s Cult of Victimhood
Why are Israelis so indignant at the international outrage that has greeted their country’s lethal attack last week on a flotilla of civilian ships taking aid to Gaza?
Israelis have not responded in any of the ways we might have expected. There has been little soul-searching about the morality, let alone legality, of soldiers invading ships in international waters and killing civilians. In the main, Israelis have not been interested in asking tough questions of their political and military leaders about why the incident was handled so badly. And only a few commentators appear concerned about the diplomatic fall-out.
Instead, Israelis are engaged in a Kafkaesque conversation in which the military attack on the civilian ships is characterised as a legitimate “act of self-defence”, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it, and the killing of nine aid activists is transformed into an attempted “lynching of our soldiers” by terrorists.
…
Meanwhile, the lesson the rest of us need to draw from the deadly commando raid is that the world can no longer afford to indulge these delusions.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19637
6. “Is Obama BP’s Poodle?
Obama’s religious faith in BP to properly handle the spill — after it had no emergency plan to deal with such a spill in the first place — borders on lunacy. But the logic is sensible from the corporate prospective, which preaches that all is rational which protects profits.
In a sane world, BP’s executives would be facing severe criminal charges, and the billions of profits they’ve earned in the last year would be confiscated to pay for the cleanup. BP’s infrastructure would be taken under the control of the U.S. government, which could ensure that the job was done correctly, timely, and publicly, as opposed to the shield of corporate secrecy currently protecting BP.
The ultimate lesson of this environmental/economic catastrophe is that Obama is not at all serious about confronting corporate interests. Rather, he allows them to stampede over the public interests, ensuring that such disasters will happen again.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25668.htm
