US – Breaking News

Kashmir’s 20-Year Conflict Legacy 
By  Farooq A Ganai, IOL Correspondent
 
 
 
SRINAGAR — Twenty years of militancy in the India-controlled part of Muslim-majority Kashmir have taken massive toll on the people who are victimized by violence, abuse, disease, poverty and ignorance.
"It is not only killings that have affected Kashmiris but the torture done to the people by Indian security forces," human rights activist Khuram Parvez told IslamOnline.net.

"Young boys are addicted to drugs, children got orphaned and thousands of women spending widowed life."

More than 60,000 people have been killed since Kashmiris took up arms against the Indian rule in 1989.

Kashmir is divided into two parts and ruled by India and Pakistan, which have fought two of their three wars since the 1947 independence over the disputed Himalayan region.

Read More »Kashmirs 20 year conflict legacy

By Naeem Jeenah

(source: Mail & Guardian, pg 37, Friday,11/02/2011)

As the Tunisian uprising gained momentum after four weeks of protests and former president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was spirited out of the country, questions were being asked about “who next” would face the “Tunisia effect” and whether the North African country was the first of a set of dominoes to fall across the Arab world.

We now know that Egypt was next — even if that country’s president stubbornly refuses to go anywhere. But there is no set of dominoes that will result in despots fleeing their countries or being forced into early retirement.

While observers excitedly point to protests in Jordan, Algeria, Yemen and Syria, none of these represent the same phenomena as Tunisia or Egypt. The conditions in each country are sufficiently different that one cannot predict whether there will be a “next”.

This is not to say, however, that the two uprisings — especially that in Egypt — have had no impact on other regimes in the region. Jordan’s King Abdullah dissolved the cabinet and appointed a new prime minister; Algeria announced the lifting of the two-decades-old state of emergency; Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh announced he would not contest the next election in 2013; Syria announced it would ease restrictions on certain rights such as free expression.

And it hasn’t only been Arab dictators who felt pressured. Ethiopia’s government announced a cap on the price of basic foods within days of Ben Ali’s flight from Tunisia; the general strike in Bangladesh has been partly inspired by Egypt; and some commentators even point to the possibility of “the Egypt effect” in Russia and the former Soviet states.

Read More »Egyptian aftershock felt most by Isarael

Another War, Another Defeat  

 The Gaza offensive has succeeded in punishing the Palestinians but not in making Israel more secure.

By John J. Mearsheimer

John J. Mearsheimer is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and coauthor of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. 

Israelis and their American supporters claim that Israel learned its lessons well from the disastrous 2006 Lebanon war and has devised a winning strategy for the present war against Hamas. Of course, when a ceasefire comes, Israel will declare victory. Don’t believe it. Israel has foolishly started another war it cannot win.

The campaign in Gaza is said to have two objectives: 1) to put an end to the rockets and mortars that Palestinians have been firing into southern Israel since it withdrew from Gaza in August 2005; 2) to restore Israel’s deterrent, which was said to be diminished by the Lebanon fiasco, by Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, and by its inability to halt Iran’s nuclear program.

Read More »Another war another defeat

Obama’s Financial Reform Proposal: A Stealth Scheme for Global Monetary Control
by Stephen Lendman

When politicians plan reform, it’s wise to be skeptical and hold on to your wallets. So fixing the economy by bailing out Wall Street is wrecking it, and Obama’s proposed health care reform taxes more, provides less, places profits above human need, avoids the most vital solutions, and leaves a broken system in place.

Now there’s "Financial Regulatory Reform, A New Foundation: Rebuilding Financial Supervision and Regulation" – announced June 17 with Obama saying he’ll send Congress a plan to create new government agencies, give the private banking cartel Federal Reserve more power, and address five major problems needing regulatory and legislative measures to fix.

Addressing business executives in the White House East Room, he said:

"A culture of irresponsibility took root from Wall Street to Washington to Main Street" with no mention that months of it worsened on his watch. "A regulatory regime basically crafted in the wake of a 20th century economic crisis – the Great Depression – was overwhelmed by the speed, scope and sophistication of a 21st century global economy." In fact, 30 years of deregulation since the late 1970s, not technology, caused speculative excesses, market bubbles, and inevitable collapses that always follow.

Of course, these problems are endemic under a system that’s crisis-prone, unstable, anarchic, ungovernable, and self-destructive through repeated cycles of booms creating bubbles, then busts, followed by recessions or depressions with today’s collapse grave enough for Michel Chossudovky to call it "far more serious than the Great Depression (because all) major sectors of the global economy are affected."

Read More »Obamas financial reform proposal a stealth scheme for global monetary control