Israel air strikes pounded targets in Gaza for a second night Israel's deputy defense minister has said Israel will have "no choice" but to invade Gaza if Palestinian militants step up rocket attacks. Matan Vilnai said Palestinians risked a "shoah", the Hebrew word for the Nazi Holocaust.
Mr Vilnai made the comments after rockets hit the city of Ashkelon, 10km (six miles) from Gaza. His colleagues insisted he had not meant "genocide."
But the blockade and military attacks against of 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza is looking more and more like a genocide to the rest of the world. Not to readers of the NY Times, however. This story never made it. The NY Times carried 10 holocaust stories in the last week, but they were all about the German extermination of the Jews in WW II.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7270650.stm
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The FBI now keeps a list of over 900,000 names belonging to known or suspected terrorists, the American Civil Liberties Union said today.
If that number is accurate, it would be an all-time high, exponentially more than the 100,000 names on the list several years ago. But the number needs to be taken with a grain of salt: after all, the ACLU doesn’t keep the list, the FBI does, and the bureau doesn’t generally like to talk about it. (Indeed, the FBI has not yet responded to a request for comment for this post.)
But if the ACLU’s figure isn’t accurate, it’s also unlikely to be off by that much. Last September, the ACLU notes, the Department of Justice’s Inspector General reported the FBI watch list was at 700,000 names, and growing at 20,000 names per month.
But the NY Times isn't worried about this massive increase. It didn't report the ACLU statement.
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/02/28/7337/
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After six years of US-led military support and billions of pounds in aid, security in Afghanistan is "deteriorating" and President Hamid Karzai's government controls less than a third of the country, America's top intelligence official has admitted.
Mike McConnell testified in Washington that Karzai controls about 30% of Afghanistan and the Taliban 10%, and the remainder is under tribal control...
The gloomy comments echoed even more strongly worded recent reports by think tanks, including one headed by the former Nato commander General James Jones, which concluded that "urgent changes" were required now to "prevent Afghanistan becoming a failed state".
Failed state? Afghanistan? Who knew? Not readers of the NY Times who never got McConnell's testimony. In fact, the NY Times covered Mike McConnell a lot in the last week, mostly warnings about Iran's nuclear ambitions.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/29/afghanistan.terrorism
