A pro-Palestinian British activist who was shot in the head by an Israeli soldier died because of malpractice by his British doctors, a defense lawyer claimed Sunday in closing arguments in the trial of the soldier accused shooting the activist.

The soldier, who is not identified under army regulations, is accused of shooting Tom Hurndall in the head during an army operation in the Gaza Strip in April 2003. Witnesses said Hurndall, 22, was helping Palestinian children avoid Israeli tanks.

Hurndall lay in a comatose state for nine months before he died in a London hospital.

Defense lawyer Yariv Ronen said that the soldier should be acquitted of a manslaughter charge because Turndall "did not die from the wound but because the doctors, together with the family, made a very clear decision to end his life."

Ronen said the doctors denied Hurndall antibiotic treatment and gave him an overdose of morphine.

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Some boast they were Taliban fighters. Others — an invalid, a chicken farmer, a nomad, a nervous name-dropper — say they were in the wrong place at the wrong time when they were plucked from Afghanistan, Pakistan or other countries and flown to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

A prisoner accused of being a member of "al-Irata," asks what the group is — a question that stumps the tribunal president.

Freed Briton, Feroz Abbasi, was kicked out of the proceedings for engaging in a heated debate about international law with the tribunal president, who snaps, "I don't care about international law. I don't want to hear the words international law again."

Their stories are tucked inside nearly 2,000 pages of documents the U.S. government released to The Associated Press under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

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The United States administration turned a blind eye to extensive sanctions-busting in the prewar sale of Iraqi oil, according to a new Senate investigation. The report found that US oil purchases accounted for 52% of the kickbacks paid to the regime in return for sales of cheap oil - more than the rest of the world put together.

"The United States was not only aware of Iraqi oil sales which violated UN sanctions and provided the bulk of the illicit money Saddam Hussein obtained from circumventing UN sanctions," the report said. "On occasion, the United States actually facilitated the illicit oil sales."

But that didn't stop the hypocrites slandering British MP, George Galloway who was summoned to appear before the senate committee to answer accusations he partook in the kick-backs. His reply was devastating.

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The brutal put-down of an uprising in Uzbekistan which has left hundreds dead and thousands more wounded has prompted a devastating response from world leaders.

The U.S. Embassy in Tashkent said that "American citizens in Andijan are encouraged to stay off the streets." The White House said "We have had concerns about human rights in Uzbekistan, but we are concerned about the outbreak of violence, particularly by some members of a terrorist organization that were freed from prison. The people of Uzbekistan want to see a more representative and democratic government, but that should come through peaceful means, not through violence. And that's what our message is." Harsh! (blaming the protestors for forcing the government to shoot them).

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said that as the UK approaches its presidency of the European Union, it will use the collective weight of that body to urge the Uzbek government to deal with what he called "patent failings in respect of human and civil rights." That's tough! (Well, it will be one day. Maybe.)

Putin's reaction was swift and decisive - he said the situation posed a "threat to the stability of Central Asia."

Uzbekistan hosts a key U.S. airbase on the border with Afghanistan. With large gas and oil reserves, Uzbekistan is self-sufficient in energy. It is also among the world's top 10 gold producers and the number five cotton producer.

(source for reactions - CNN)

The USA is about to cut the number of military bases it has in a cost cutting measure... but only in the USA itself.

Currently there are 46 countries without a US military presence.

Australian authorities have admitted they knew for two years that a mentally ill Australian woman injured after being struck by a car was mistakenly deported to the Philippines in 2001 but did nothing to find her and bring her home.

Even worse, Queensland Premier Peter Beattie said yesterday that the woman's son, now nine, was placed in foster care four years ago after his mother, Vivian Alvarez, failed to pick him up from a Brisbane creche.

This comes after a mentally ill German-born Cornelia Rau was locked up in one of the country's notorious detention centres for 10 months before authorities realised she was actually a citizen.

Mr Howard has refused to apologise about the mistaken detention Ms Rau, saying he would instead await the outcome of the inquiry into her detention, headed by former federal police chief Mick Palmer.

 The Germans are outraged that the English keep bringing up the Pope's Nazi history, and headlines such as "From Hitler Youth to... Papa Ratzi."



A Bild editorial written by senior journalist Franz Josef Wagner said: "If you read the British tabloids yesterday, you would have thought Hitler had become pope.


"Only the devil could come up with such a thing. Or you English, with your complexes.

"It is like in football matches, we are always the Nazis."


The editorial added: "I do not hate in return. The pope in his goodness will include you idiots in his prayers. Yes you, the editors of The Sun and the Daily Mirror. Even idiots go to heaven."


 A common thread I have heard from Pope sympathizers is that he deserted. They make it sound like Joseph Ratzinger didn't really like being a Nazi, and deserted even though he could have been summarily eexecuted if he'd been caught. Few make mention of how long he served, implying he did it soon after joining. That slant is however disingenuous.


After joining the Hitler Youth in 1941 he didn't actually desert until May 1945. Which is, really, a bit late. Most of Germany was overrun well before May 1945, and in fact by 8th May Germany surrendered. Hilter killed himself in April, so you could say that Hitler deserted before the future pope. 

by William Neal Reynolds


Thomas Macaulay told us copyright law is a tax on readers for the benefit of writers, a tax that shouldn’t last a day longer than necessary. What do we do? We extend the copyright term repeatedly. The US goes from fourteen years to the author’s life plus seventy years. We extend protection retrospectively to dead authors, perhaps in the hope they will write from their tombs.


Since only about 4 per cent of copyrighted works more than 20 years old are commercially available, this locks up 96 per cent of 20th century culture to benefit 4 per cent. The harm to the public is huge, the benefit to authors, tiny. In any other field, the officials responsible would be fired. Not here.

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by Terry Jones

A report to the UN human rights commission in Geneva has concluded that Iraqi children were actually better off under Saddam Hussein than they are now.

This, of course, comes as a bitter blow for all those of us who, like George Bush and Tony Blair, honestly believe that children thrive best when we drop bombs on them from a great height, destroy their cities and blow up hospitals, schools and power stations.

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The army decided not to prosecute the soldier believed responsible for the death of a British filmmaker in the Gaza Strip.

The family of James Miller said military prosecutor-general Avihai Mandelblitt told them the soldier would not be indicted in connection with the cameraman's death but would be disciplined for changing his story during the investigation.

The army said military police had carefully investigated the incident and had been unable to establish the soldier's guilt.

"The findings of the military police show that an Israel Defense Forces lieutenant, the commanding officer of the IDF force at the site, allegedly fired his weapon in breach of IDF rules of engagement," a statement said. "However, it is not legally possible to link this shooting to the gunshot sustained by Mr. Miller."

Miller's widow, Sophy, criticized the military investigation. "Although they strongly suspect one soldier, they cannot make a ballistics match," she said. "This is not surprising to us, as they failed to collect the weapons for 11 weeks."

Miller was gunned down in May 2003 while making a documentary about the impact of regional violence on children. He and his colleagues were leaving a Palestinian family's home in the Rafah refugee camp after dark when the shooting occurred.

Miller's group carried a white flag and called out to troops that they were British journalists, but as they walked toward an Israeli armored personnel carrier, an Israeli soldier opened fire and shot Miller in the neck, the family said.

You can witness the murder of Miller in the movie "Death in Gaza."

A better movie on conditions in Palestine is "Gaza Strip."

In a two-paragraph letter dated March 7, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice informed U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan that the United States "hereby withdraws" from the Optional Protocol to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. The United States proposed the protocol in 1963 and ratified it -- along with the rest of the Vienna Convention -- in 1969.

The United States initially backed the measure as a means to protect its citizens abroad. It was also the first country to invoke the protocol before the ICJ, also known as the World Court, successfully suing Iran for the taking of 52 U.S. hostages in Tehran in 1979.

But in recent years, other countries, with the support of U.S. opponents of capital punishment, successfully complained before the World Court that their citizens were sentenced to death by U.S. states without receiving access to diplomats from their home countries.

...But the Pentagon says it's not trying to hide the wounded from anyone. (Pentagon officials have also denied that banning photographs of coffins at Dover was a P.R. decision.) Capt. Herbert McConnell, a spokesman for Andrews Air Force Base, said that while it's true the flights of wounded arrive only at night, the schedule is not designed to minimize images of wounded soldiers. "There is no conspiracy, I can tell you that. I am absolutely sure there is no effort to bring them in under the darkness of night," McConnell said. "There is nothing shady going on here."

From Andrews, some of the most seriously wounded are driven to Walter Reed or Bethesda Naval Medical Center in buses, ambulances or unmarked black vans. Photos of the arrivals at the hospitals are prohibited.

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Israel has quietly seized large tracts of Jerusalem land owned by Palestinian residents of the West Bank after they were cut off from their property by Israel's separation barrier.

The land was taken after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government decided several months ago to enforce a long-dormant law that allows Israel to seize lands of Palestinians who fled or were driven out during the 1948-49 Mideast war that followed Israel's creation.

The landowners affected so far live in the West Bank towns of Bethlehem and Beit Jalla, just south of Jerusalem. Their land was taken in August, after Israel's West Bank separation barrier cut them off from their land in the city.

Bethlehem resident Johnny Atik said Sunday that he lost eight acres of olive groves within Jerusalem's municipal boundaries as a result of the new policy. The land is just 100 yards away from his home, on the other side of an electronic fence and patrol road that are part of the separation barrier.

"The olives fall on the ground," he said. "We see them, but we can't get to them."

Atik said 40 families in his neighborhood alone have had land taken.

The disparity between government promises and the delivery of emergency and rehabilitation aid can be extreme. Iranian government officials working to rebuild Bam, destroyed by an earthquake exactly a year before the Asian tsunami, last week said that of $1.1bn aid promised by foreign countries and organizations only $17.5m had been sent.

Here's a flash animation on the subject.

This site contains before and after satellite images of the tsunami affected areas - from it you can really see just how badly Aceh has been affected - well, not so much affected as completely wiped out. Very, very bad.

He would not reject a 2002 ruling, made under his direction, that the infliction of pain short of serious physical injury, organ failure or death did not constitute torture: "I don't have a disagreement with the conclusions then reached," he said.

The American soldiers who grotesquely humiliated prisoners at Abu Ghraib were "simply people who were morally bankrupt trying to have fun."

Who is he? Attorney General-designate Alberto Gonzales!

On ya mate!