MRN

(source: HAARETZ)

by Staff Writers

The $25 million deal is said to have been clinched through Amit Sadeh, a middle-man implicated in the "controversial sale of air and sea drones by the Yavneh-based Aeronautics Ventures to the Nigerian defense ministry," the AllAfrica Web site reported.

Read More »Israel eyeing Africa arms exports

By Khaled Amayreh

(source: Palestine Information Centre)

When addressing Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims, Fatah indulges in all sorts of bombastic rhetoric about the liberation of Palestine.

However, in negotiations with Israel and meetings with visiting Western officials, the leaders of the movement would dutifully  assure their interlocutors that the rhetoric was only meant  for public consumption and that Fatah would eventually accept  a “peace” deal  with the Zionist state even if  such a deal didn’t meet Palestinian expectations.

I recently asked a prominent Palestinian intellectual who maintains close  ties with the Palestinian Authority (PA)  leadership if he  thought that PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, who is Fatah’s undisputed leader,  had any alternative plan in case the Obama peace efforts collapsed.My interlocutor didn’t mince his words. He said that the only alternative Abbas had to failed negotiations with Israel was more failed negotiations.

Unfortunately, this seems to be completely true.

Abbas views lightly, even contemptuously Fatah’s occasional allusion about resuming “armed struggle” in case Israel refuses to end the occupation. Well, Israel not only refuses to end the occupation, but is also consolidating and perpetuating it by making the prospect of creating a Palestinian state on the West Bank unrealistic and illusive.

But why would Abbas look  down on these late-time pseudo revolutionaries within his party, who threaten to rise up anew against Israel while enjoying the fruits of political and security coordination with the enemy they are threatening to fight?

Well, the answer is clear. Abbas thinks, probably correctly, that these Fatah leaders are either hypocrites or liars, or both. After all, most of them have reached the positions they are now having thanks to the close cooperation and collaboration with Israel, mainly against other Palestinians, especially Hamas. Read More »Fatahs schizophrenia

By Raj Patel & Eric Holt-Gimenez & Annie Shattuck

(Source: The Nation)

More than a billion people eat fewer than 1,900 calories per day. The majority of them work in agriculture, about 60 percent are women or girls, and most are in rural Africa and Asia. Ending their hunger is one of the few unimpeachably noble tasks left to humanity, and we live in a rare time when there is the knowledge and political will to do so. The question is, how? Conventional wisdom suggests that if people are hungry, there must be a shortage of food, and all we need do is figure out how to grow more.

This logic turns hunger into a symptom of a technological deficit, telling a story in which a little agricultural know-how can feed the world. It’s a seductive view, and one that appears to underwrite President Obama’s vision for ending hunger. In an interview with an African news agency, he shared his frustration over "the fact that the Green Revolution that we introduced into India in the ’60s, we haven’t yet introduced into Africa in 2009. In some countries, you’ve got declining agricultural productivity. That makes absolutely no sense."

In a squat beige Seattle office building, the world’s largest philanthropic organization has been thinking along the same lines as the president. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with an endowment of more than $30 billion, has embarked on a multibillion-dollar effort to transform African agriculture. It helped to set up the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) in 2006, and since then has spent $1.3 billion on agricultural development grants, largely in Africa. With such resources, solving African hunger could be Gates’s greatest legacy.

But there’s a problem: the conventional wisdom is wrong. Food output per person is as high as it has ever been, suggesting that hunger isn’t a problem of production so much as one of distribution. It’s true that African soil fertility is poor, though, which might explain why President Obama feels that the continent needs a Green Revolution. Read More »Ending Africas hunger

By Dr. Sahib Mustaqim Bleher { The Flying Imam }

(source: Radical Views.org)

What do 9/11 and the liquid bomb plot have in common? They both replace reality with make-belief by seriously violating the laws of physics. And they represent a propaganda effort by today’s war governments Joseph Goebbels would be proud of, thereby demonstrating that the masses in a democratic society can be easily fooled through the repeated use of media and are thus unable to make informed choices – dictatorship by consent.

Let’s start with 9/11: According to the propaganda the heat of burning kerosene fuel from the aircraft which hit the high-rise buildings melted the steel reinforcements and made the steel/concrete structure collapse. This is an impossibility unless all the teachings of physics are going to be more radically revised than ever before: the hottest possible temperature of burning kerosene is 825°C, whilst steel starts melting at 1510°C.

If burning kerosene melted steel or other metals (such as aluminium, with a lower melting point), airo engines would arrive liquidised before any jet plane ever made a safe landing. Even if the steel melted, the collapse of the building would have been gradual and not immediate; instead it simply disappeared into its own footprint with all the concrete being pulverised and none of the lower floors putting up resistance to the collapsing upper ones. According to the current state of the art of physics, this can only be achieved by a controlled demolition, and recent finds of thermite in the rubble support this claim. Yet, the myth wins over the facts.

Read More »Terrorising the laws of physics