Associated Press – As the U.S. military prepares to leave Iraq, the State Department is blaming the Iraqi government for arbitrary killings of civilians and other human rights abuses. The department’s annual human rights report, released Thursday, also highlighted abuses in Afghanistan, another country where American troops are battling an insurgency. Civilians suffered the most when violence in Afghanistan spiked last year, the report said. Blaming the insurgents, the report said that almost one-third of Afghanistan was plunged into armed conflict, reducing the government’s ability to protect its citizens and extend its influence. Read Article
AFP – Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak has ordered the army to seal off the West Bank for 48 hours until midnight on Saturday, an army spokesman said. The action was taken “for security reasons” including a risk of attacks, the spokesman said Friday. The area was sealed off at midnight on Thursday. Israeli police have also said they would bar Muslim men under the age of 50 from prayers on Friday at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque compound, one of Islam’s holiest sites, fearing unrest. Read article
BBC – Turkey has withdrawn its ambassador to Sweden after the parliament voted narrowly to describe as genocide the killing of Armenians in World War I. The Turkish government condemned the resolution, saying it was “based upon major errors and without foundation”. The Swedish government opposed the opposition resolution but it passed by one vote after some MPs voted against party lines. It comes days after a US congressional panel passed a similar resolution. Read article
Reuters – Vice President Joe Biden publicly scolded Israel on Wednesday over a Jewish settlement plan, saying it was undermining peace efforts after Palestinians agreed to U.S.-mediated talks. “It is incumbent on both parties to build an atmosphere of support for negotiations and not to complicate them,” Biden said in a media statement alongside Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank city of Ramallah. “Yesterday the decision by the Israeli government to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem undermines that very trust, the trust that we need right now in order to begin … profitable negotiations,” Biden said. Read article
BBC – The US has said Israel’s authorisation of new building in a Jewish settlement in the West Bank does not violate a recently announced moratorium. But a state department spokesman said it was “the kind of thing that both sides need to be cautious of”. Israel has promised a 10-month pause in settlement building in the West Bank, though not in East Jerusalem. Read article
Guardian – Approval to build 112 new flats in Beitar Illit comes despite Israeli government’s partial curbs on settlement construction. The Israeli defence ministry today authorised further construction in a Jewish settlement on the occupied West Bank. The decision came prior to the arrival in Israel of the US vice-president, Joe Biden, who is expected to announce a new round of indirect peace talks. Approval for 112 new flats in Beitar Illit, an ultra-Orthodox settlement near Bethlehem, was given despite a 10-month partial curb on settlement construction announced by the Israeli government under heavy US pressure in November. Read article
Press TV – The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) urges an all-out international effort aimed at ending the Israeli aggression after an Israeli raid on the Al-Aqsa Mosque. On Saturday, OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu called for “an international intervention effective at every level to end Israeli aggressions and make Israel respect international law,” AFP reported. The Israeli forces on Friday raided the compound of the holy site in the occupied East Jerusalem (Al-Quds) to push out Palestinian worshippers who had gathered for the weekly Friday prayers. Read article
Bloomberg — BP Plc and Exxon Mobil Corp. took the best deal they could get in Iraq last year when they won the largest oil contracts since addam Hussein was toppled in 2003. Oil companies may wait a long time to get a better one. Parliamentary elections may produce a weak or unstable government incapable of tendering new oil contracts, said Samuel Ciszuk, a London-based analyst at IHS Global Insight. He said he does expect the 10 technical-services contracts won by Exxon, BP and 20 other companies to be honored. Read Article
Arab News – Syria said on Thursday that Israel dropped uranium particles onto Syrian soil from the air to make it look as if a covert nuclear weapons plant was being built there, diplomats at a UN nuclear watchdog meeting said. Damascus has strongly denied US intelligence that a complex in the Syrian desert bombed to ruins by Israel in 2007 had been a nascent nuclear reactor, North Korean in design and geared to making plutonium for atomic bombs. Read article
Reuters – The Obama administration on Friday sought to limit fallout from a resolution branding the World War One-era massacre of Armenians by Turkish forces as “genocide,” and vowed to stop it from going further in Congress. Turkey was infuriated and recalled its ambassador after a House of Representatives committee on Thursday approved the nonbinding measure condemning killings that took place nearly 100 years ago, in the last days of the Ottoman Empire. Read article
Telegraph – Heydar Aliyev, the son of Ilham Aliyev, the oil-rich country’s president, allegedly spent almost £30 million (US$44 million) on nine waterfront mansions in the southern Gulf emirate earlier this year, reports said. The boy, who was 11 at the time, made the purchase in the Palm Jumeirah development over two weeks, the Washington Post reported on Friday. Heydar’s name and his date of birth appeared on Dubai Land Department records, which were obtained by the paper. The details listed on the property records were the same as those of the son of the former Soviet Republic’s president, whose annual salary is about £150,000 ($228,000). Read article
Reuters – A U.S. congressional panel voted on Thursday to label as “genocide” the World War One-era massacre of Armenians by Turkish forces, prompting Turkey to recall its ambassador from Washington. The House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee voted 23-22 to approve the non-binding resolution, which calls on President Barack Obama to ensure U.S. policy formally refers to the killings as genocide. Read article
BBC – Doctors in the Iraqi city of Fallujah are reporting a high level of birth defects, with some blaming weapons used by the US after the Iraq invasion.The city witnessed fierce fighting in 2004 as US forces carried out a major offensive against insurgents. Now, the level of heart defects among newborn babies is said to be 13 times higher than in Europe. The US military says it is not aware of any official reports showing an increase in birth defects in the area. Read Article
Ed – To read more about the most commonly used weapon of mass detruction, depleted uranium, CLICK HERE
Bloomberg – A few miles beyond an irrigated golf course on the outskirts of Damascus, scores of refugees fleeing drought in Syria’s northeastern breadbasket have settled into tents on a rocky field. “Our wells are dry and the rains don’t come,” said Ahmed Abu Hamed Mohieddin, a wheat farmer from the town of Qamishli in the Fertile Crescent, a rich agricultural area stretching from Iraq to Israel. “We cannot depend on God’s will for our crops. We come to the city, where the money is.” He and three sons work as porters in the capital’s vegetable markets. They are among about 300,000 families driven to Damascus, Aleppo and other cities in one of the “largest internal displacements in the Middle East in recent years,” according to a Feb. 17 report by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Read Article
Ed – It should also be noted that Syria has an estimated 1.2 million Iraqi refugees living inside its borders currently
Times Online – Scores of Palestinian homes in one of Jerusalem’s most volatile neighbourhoods will need to be demolished to make way for a parks project under plans unveiled yesterday by the city’s Israeli mayor. More than 88 homes in the Arab-dominated Silwan valley area of the city are scheduled to be removed to make way for a tourist centre. The plan has been criticised by Palestinians and the United Nations. Read article
BBC – The authorities in Iran have closed down the country’s biggest-circulation reformist newspaper, Etemaad, accusing it of breaching media laws. They also suspended publication of a weekly reformist paper whose managing director is the son of one of Iran’s opposition leaders, Mehdi Karroubi. Read article
Associated Press – President Barack Obama is in a bind as a House committee prepares to vote on a resolution that would recognize the World War I-era killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks as genocide. While a White House candidate, then-Sen. Obama said he believed the killings were genocide. A congressional resolution to that effect could alienate Turkey, a NATO ally and traditional friend of the United States that is crucial to America’s foreign policy goals. Read article
ABC – In Turkey, two retired generals have been charged over an alleged coup plot in 2003 – the most senior military officers to be charged so far. A total of 33 officers have been charged. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan issued a warning to anyone conspiring against the elected government that they will be brought to justice. Read article
CBC – Australia’s foreign minister has summoned Israel’s ambassador to investigate the use of forged Australian passports in a Dubai assassination. Stephen Smith called Yuval Rotem to his office in Canberra, the capital, on Thursday. He warned him any involvement of Israel in the use of the passports — used in the Jan. 19 killing of a senior Hamas figure — would not be seen as the “act of a friend.” “I made it crystal clear to the ambassador that if the results of that investigation cause us to come to the conclusion that the abuse of the Australian passports was in any way sponsored or condoned by Israeli officials, then Australia would not regard that as the act of a friend,” Smith told reporters. Read Article
Ed – Using the principles of Problem, Reactuion, Solution, expect the Australian Government to soon announce the introduction of bio-metric data and RFID chips in all Australian passports, so to ‘prevent this kind of thing happening again’
The National – The Israeli government and its right-wing supporters have been waging a “McCarthyite” campaign against human-rights groups by blaming them for the barrage of international criticism that has followed Israel’s attack on Gaza a year ago, critics say. In a sign of the growing backlash against the human-rights community, the cabinet backed a bill last week that, if passed, will jail senior officials from the country’s peace-related organisations should they fail to meet tough new registration conditions. Read Article
BBC – Israel’s prime minister has announced a controversial plan to add two major religious sites in the West Bank to the country’s national heritage list. Benjamin Netanyahu told his cabinet the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron and Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem would now be included in the $107m restoration plan. Read article
Spiegel – The community of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel is half a million strong and growing. They live in a parallel universe cut off from the modern world in tight-knit communities where everything revolves around religion. Only a few dare to abandon this life — and the price for doing so is high. When she left, she left everything behind — even her name. She no longer wanted to be known as Sarah, the name her parents had given her. She’d felt imprisoned by that name for too long; it made her feel different and subject to laws that others imposed upon her. So, she started her new life with a new name, Mayan, the Hebrew word for “source.” Read article
The Times – Rates of leukaemia in children around the Basra area of Southern Iraq have almost tripled in the last 15 years according to calculations by public health experts. Research published in the American Journal of Public Health documents 698 cases of leukaemia among children under the age of 15 in the period to 2007. There was a peak of 211 cases in 2006. Rates increased from three to almost 8.5 cases of the disease per 100,000 children over the time period. This is more than double the rate of leukaemia in the European Union. Read Article
Press TV = A Palestinian Authority court has sentenced a Palestinian journalist with the official Hamas-run television channel to 18 months in prison over affiliation to the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas). The court on Tuesday ruled that the 37-year-old reporter, Tariq Abu Zaid, who works for the official Hamas-run television network Al-Aqsa TV, must serve the term since acting Palestinian Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas has forbidden Hamas and affiliated organizations from conducting any activities in the occupied West Bank. Read Article
UPI – A controversial order of Israeli-made Heron unmanned aerial vehicles passed critical performance tests in Israel and will soon be delivered, Turkey’s top procurement official says. “Six of the aircraft have successfully passed the tests inspected by a delegation of Turkish officials,” Murad Bayar, head of the government’s defense procurement agency, the Under Secretariat for Defense Industries was quoted telling local media. “We are expecting their deliveries in the weeks ahead. And this closes the deal from our point of view.” Read article
