Palestine – Breaking News

 

 Picture: (AFP/File/Alexander Joe)
African National Congress (ANC) president Jacob Zuma (L) talks to his deputy Kgalema Motlanthe during the 52nd National Congress in 2007

By Tahir Sema

On the 22nd of September Jacob Zuma had hinted that ANC deputy president Kgalema Motlanthe would be the acting president, though he refused to make it official stating that it is parliament’s decision and not that of the senior members of the ANC represented at the conference in which he spoke at.

The tip of by Zuma that Kgalema Motlanthe would be the acting president of South Africa was also reaffirmed by information leaked to Reuters earlier this morning by ANC members who spoke on condition of anonymity; claiming that it has already been decided.

Media Review Network spoke to ordinary South Africans and they view Motlanthe as a suitable candidate for acting president, even the Democratic Alliance known for its criticism against the ANC and its policies, approves of Motlanthe.  Many did not favour Baleka Mbete, the current Speaker of parliament, because of incidents in the past and her reputation.

Jacob Zuma stated that Thabo Mbeki “remains a comrade” adding that Mbeki will continue to be given tasks as a cadre and one of the senior leaders of the movement.

Zuma has made it clear and reassured all South Africans as well as the international community that the ANC “will do all in its power to ensure that stability is maintained in governance and service delivery”.

South Africans were told not to panic as the ANC expects a smooth transition; Zuma on behalf of the ANC says “this is not a change of party but only leadership in government.”

MRN welcomes the smooth transition of leadership, and hopes that it contributes to stability. MRN’s chairperson Iqbal Jassat says “we are pleased that outgoing President Mbeki has displayed statesmanship by obliging, in what can only be described as trying times is South Africa’s young democracy.

Meanwhile Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka has resigned, her spokesman Denzil Taylor confirmed that "Yes, she has resigned. The deputy president has resigned to outgoing President Thabo Mbeki".

"She resigned for two reasons — for personal reasons, and also she wants to afford the new president the opportunity to elect his or her own deputy president."

 

MEANWHILE

MANUEL’S RESIGNATION CAUSES CONFUSION: ECONOMIST

T-Sec economist Mike  Schussler says the resignation of Finance Minister Trevor Manuel has caused confusion and volatility in the country’s markets.

Schussler  says "He resigns and then in the next hour he says he may be prepared to stay on. He should have announced his situation upfront — now people in the market are really confused."

Schussler says,  as a consequence, there had been tremendous pressure on the rand, "It bounced back but now it’s gone backwards again.  "At 2.33pm the local currency was trading at 8.14 to the US dollar.

He added that the resignation and the subsequent announcement that Manuel may be prepared to stay on had scared both local and foreign investors.
 
Schussler added that "No one knows what the markets will do in the next few hours."

Earlier it was announced that Manuel was among 11 Cabinet ministers and three deputy ministers who had resigned.

Their letters of resignation had been received by President Thabo Mbeki "which, regretfully, he has had to accept", the presidency said.

Later, however, Manuel’s spokeswoman Thoraya Pandy said that both he and his Deputy Minister Jabu Moleketi were "ready to serve" a new administration.
  
Sapa 

 

Read More »Zuma approves motlanthe

By George Bisharat

(source: Washington Post)

"Where is the Palestinian Mandela?" pundits occasionally ask. But after these latest Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in Washington fail — as they inevitably will — the more pressing question may be: "Where is the Israeli de Klerk?" Will an Israeli leader emerge with the former South African president’s moral courage and foresight to dismantle a discriminatory regime and foster democracy based on equal rights?

For decades, the international community has assumed that historic Palestine must be divided between Jews and Palestinians. Yet no satisfactory division of the land has been reached. Israel has aggravated the problem by settling roughly 500,000 Jews in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, eliminating the land base for a viable Palestinian state.

A de facto one-state reality has emerged, with Israel effectively ruling virtually all of the former Palestine. Yet only Jews enjoy full rights in this functionally unitary political system. In contrast, Palestinian citizens of Israel endure more than 35 laws that explicitly privilege Jews as well as policies that deliberately marginalize them. West Bank Palestinians cannot drive on roads built for Israeli settlers, while Palestinians in Gaza watch as their children’s intellectual and physical growth are stunted by an Israeli siege that has limited educational opportunities and deepened poverty to acute levels.

Read More »Israel and Palestine a true one state solution

Israel officials call report by Dutch director George Sluizer a ‘modern blood libel’ after he director claimed to have seen then Defense Minster shooting children from close range near the Sabra-Shatilla refugee camp in 1982.

By Cnaan Liphshiz 

(source: Haaretz)

Dutch media this month published articles accusing Ariel Sharon of murdering Palestinian children in Lebanon. Former officials who worked with Sharon said the publications were false. The Israeli foreign ministry called the claim “a modern blood libel.”

The claim first appeared in the Volkskrant, the third largest paper in the Netherlands, in an interview with the well-known Dutch-Jewish director George Sluizer. According to Sluizer, 78, he witnessed Sharon killing two Palestinian toddlers with a pistol in 1982 near the refugee camp Sabra-Shatilla while filming a documentary there.

“I met Sharon and saw him kill two children before my eyes,” said Sluizer, who lives in Amsterdam. Sluizer has made several documentaries about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but is best known for directing The Vanishing with Jeff Bridges and Kiefer Sutherland in 1992.

Sluizer repeated the accusation in an interview for Vrij Nederland, an intellectual magazine, published on November 13 ahead of a screening of his film at the prestigious International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. “Sharon shot two children like you shoot rabbits, in front of my eyes,” he said.

The children, according to Sluizer, “were toddlers, two or three years old. He shot them from a distance of 10 meters with a pistol that he carried. I was very close to him.” Sluizer added he thought this happened in November, when Sharon was Israel’s minister of defense, but he was not sure of the month.

Read More »I saw ariel sharon murder 2 palestinian toddlers in Lebanon

By Nick Beams

(source:  World Socialist Web Site)

The announcement by credit rating agency Standard and Poor’s that it had downgraded its outlook on US debt to “negative” has sent a shudder through global financial markets. The decision means there is now a one in three chance that US debt itself will be downgraded over the next two years—an event without precedent.

More than the state of the US economy and government finances, however, is being called into question by the S&P decision. With US debt considered the safest in the world, any downgrading means that the role of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency will be severely undermined, if not ended altogether.

In response to the decision and the growing lack of confidence in all paper currencies, the price of gold has risen to a new high, reaching more than $1,500 per ounce.

Over the past decade, the dollar’s role as the pivot of the global financial system has come under increasing scrutiny, as US debts have risen and the balance of payments gap widened, requiring an increasing inflow of capital from the rest of the world, especially China. But so long as the world economy kept growing, these concerns remained somewhat in the background. Things began to change when the financial crisis erupted in 2008, revealing the rot and decay—not to speak of outright criminality—at the heart of the American financial system.

Anxiety about the US dollar’s role is being fuelled by the fact that far from being resolved, the global financial crisis that began with the collapse of Lehman Brothers two and half years ago has simply mutated.

Last weekend, billionaire financier George Soros warned that the present situation was more baffling and less predictable than at the height of the financial crisis. “There are clearly a number of unsustainable situations which nevertheless continue, and the authorities don’t necessarily try to solve them, but merely to buy time. We live in this situation without an immediate collapse or an immediate solution confronting you.”

Read More »Question mark over role ofUSdollar