March 25, 2013

Motor City Revived as Detroit Withers to Motown Shadow

By Jeff Green and Keith Naughton - Mar 25, 2013
Sheila Cockrel remembers one early sign of Detroit’s decline: The retailer J.L. Hudson’s turned off the lights on floor after empty floor as shoppers abandoned the world’s tallest department store for new suburban malls.

“That’s nobody’s fault, that’s what happens in culture,” said the former Detroit councilwoman who now teaches history at the city’s Wayne State University (26128MF). “You have these larger economic forces in play.”

Detroit so dominated U.S. car making in the 20th Century that the city’s name became synonymous with the U.S. auto industry, like Hollywood with movie making. Now one Detroit is rising from the ashes, while the other is crumbling to dust. The U.S. automakers are surging, while Detroit is in such distress that it’s being taken over by the state of Michigan today.

General Motors Co. (GM), Ford Motor Co. (F) and Chrysler Group LLC have seen rising revenue and profit in the wake of wrenching bankruptcies and restructurings, earning a combined $13.5 billion last year. Detroit is running a $375 million deficit, with 36 percent of its residents living in poverty and a murder rate at the highest level since the Reagan Administration.

“They’re linked in history and in name only,” said Scott Martelle, author of “Detroit: A Biography” and a former Detroit News reporter who now lives in Irvine, California. “There are, what, two car factories left in the city?”

Six Decades

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-25/motor-city-revived-as-detroit-withers-to-motown-shadow.html

March 25, 2013

Saving Cyprus Means Nobody Safe as Europe Breaks More Taboos

By Simon Kennedy - Mar 25, 2013
The devil lies in the detail of Cyprus’s salvation.

The island nation’s rescue sets precedents for the euro zone that may stick in the memory of depositors and bondholders alike as investors debate who will next fall victim to the debt crisis. Under the terms of the agreement struck early this morning in Brussels, senior Cypriot bank bond holders will take losses and uninsured depositors will be largely wiped out.

The message that stakeholders of all stripes can be coerced into helping a cash-strapped nation may make investors more skittish they’ll be targeted should Slovenia, Italy, Spain or even Greece again be next in line to need help. The risk is that bank runs and bond market selloffs become more likely the moment a country applies for a new rescue, said economists and academics from Nicosia to New York.

“We now have a new type of rule and everyone within the euro zone has to sit down and see what that implies for their own finances,” Nobel laureate Christopher Pissarides, an adviser to the Cypriot government, told “The Pulse” on Bloomberg Television.

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-25/saving-cyprus-means-nobody-safe-as-europe-breaks-more-taboos.html

March 24, 2013

Amnesty International: The Separation Wall Is An Ongoing Violation Of International Law

MARCH 23, 2013

LONDON, (PIC)– Amnesty International considered that the Israeli apartheid wall built on Palestinian lands in occupied West Bank represents an ongoing violation of international law because “it is cutting off Palestinians from their farmland.”

The organization said in a report: “Palestinian farmers in the northern West Bank village of Jayyus, who for years have had trouble accessing their land through the military fence/wall (which in this area takes the form of an electrified and heavily guarded fence), are now faced with Israeli settlers setting up additional obstacles.”

It pointed out that the settlers have installed a caravan outpost to the north of the Israeli settlement Tsufim near the city of Qalqilya on the farmers’ land in an apparent reaction to the resolution issued by the Israeli High Court ruling that the fence should be re-routed in order to return some of the land to the Palestinian farmers.

Ann Harrison, Deputy Director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa program, said: “Settlers obstructing the re-routing of the military fence, because it gives a fraction of the Palestinian farmers’ land back to them and frustrates the settlers’ own plans for settlement expansion, is just outrageous.”

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http://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com/2013/03/23/amnesty-international-the-separation-wall-is-an-ongoing-violation-of-international-law/

March 24, 2013

UN Human Rights Council Passes 5 New Resolutions Condemning Israel

GENEVA, (PIC)– Euro-Mediterranean Observatory for Human Rights welcomed the five resolutions that condemned the Israeli occupation at the UN Human Rights Council on Friday.

The Observatory said in a statement on Friday that the new resolutions adopted by the Human Rights Council represent the strongest UN condemnation against Israel, and pointed out that the international consensus regarding the resolutions was unprecedented.

The statement pointed out that the most important resolution is the one about implementation of the recommendations of the Fact-Finding Mission on the impact of settlements in the West Bank and occupied Jerusalem.

This resolution urges Israel to withdraw all settlers from the occupied West Bank and says that Israeli settlements are illegal. 45 states voted in favor of the draft resolution while the United States was the only member state to vote against it.

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http://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com/2013/03/23/un-human-rights-council-passes-5-new-resolutions-condemning-israel/

March 24, 2013

Obama's Visit to Apartheid Israel: The World’s Greatest Certified "Peace" Fraud

Israeli peace activist Miko Peled did not mince his words when he said:

The Israeli-Palestinian issue is, politically, a toxic wasteland that no US president in his right mind would want to clean up. It has become a vicious cycle of deceit and double standards, and it will contaminate any US politician who tries to clean it up.

One after another, American presidents run away from the challenge.

And so it has been with Barack Obama. This week the world’s greatest peace fraud came to the Holy Land and flunked it. Frankly, if that’s the best he can do after four years in the job he has no business calling himself a world leader.

AIPAC – the stinking swamp in the White House backyard

But I don’t necessarily agree with Peled’s remark. Any US president who fails to drain the stinking swamp in his backyard – i.e. the AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) breeding ground – deserves to be consigned to the wastepaper basket of history as a political pansy.

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http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20Editorials/2013/March/23%20o/Obama's%20Visit%20to%20Apartheid%20Israel,%20The%20World's%20Greatest%20Certified%20Peace%20Fraud%20By%20Stuart%20Littlewood.htm

March 24, 2013

Prisoner X Suspected of Handing Israeli Agents to Hezbollah; Branded 'Israel's Biggest Traitor'

Alleged Mossad agent Ben Zygier, known as Prisoner X before committing suicide while jailed solitary confinement, handed Hezbollah sensitive information that led to the arrest of Lebanese agents in Israel’s service, according to previews of an expose to be released by Der Spiegel on Monday.

The German news weekly alleges that before his death in an isolated Israeli prison cell, Zygier managed to transfer to Hezbollah the names of two Lebanese agents also operating at the Mossad’s behest. The two Lebanese agents, Ziad al-Homsi and Mustafa Ali Awada, were subsequently arrested in May 2009 and sentenced to lengthy prison sentences for espionage.

The article, which cites an internal investigative report obtained by Der Spiegel, brands Zygier as “Israel’s biggest traitor” and describes how the “Zionist turned into a defector.”

Read more: http://forward.com/articles/173688/prisoner-x-suspected-of-handing-israeli-agents-to/#ixzz2OV7h9cKx

March 24, 2013

Fallen Jewish Oligarch Boris Berezovsky Found Dead, Amid Depression and Mystery

Unconfirmed Reports Say Rasputin of Putin Era Killed Self

From car salesman to Kremlin king-maker to billionaire political exile, Boris Berezovsky seemed to play a role in nearly every crucial scene in the roller coaster drama of post-Soviet Russia.

A mathematician by training, Berezovsky’s expertise at political calculus gave him power beyond his position in a career that made him many enemies - the most prominent of them Vladimir Putin, the man he helped bring to power.

The cause of his death was unclear and some reports said it was a suspected suicide, The Guardian reported. His mansion was only cleared for authorities after a sweep was made for chemical or radioactive materials suggesting it might have been deliberately contaminated.
In a country with a rich history of court intrigue and a reputation for opacity in the Kremlin from tsarist, his manoeuvring earned him comparison to Russia’s ultimate behind-the-scenes operator, the “mad monk” Grigory Rasputin.

Credited with a part in saving Boris Yeltsin’s political skin and shaping Putin into presidential material with the help of money and media, he was then blamed - formally or not - for dark episodes that followed his falling out with the Kremlin.


Read more: http://forward.com/articles/173680/fallen-jewish-oligarch-boris-berezovsky-found-dead/?p=all#ixzz2OV7CZRO0

March 24, 2013

U.S., Israel To Negotiate Military Aid Extension

JERUSALEM — In an extraordinarily emotive visit here aimed at rallying Israel’s current and future leaders to seize the chance for peace, U.S. President Barack Obama doubled down on U.S. security support with a new agreement to extend annual military aid through 2027.

The pending 10-year military aid package would commit Washington to provide up to $40 billion in additional Foreign Military Financing (FMF) grant assistance to Israel, sources here say. It would automatically kick in at the conclusion of the current 10-year, $30 billion agreement signed in 2007 under President George W. Bush and would bind Obama’s successor to continued military aid to Israel.

The current agreement elevated Israel’s annual grant aid from $2.4 billion to $3.1 billion, and Israeli officials expect the follow-on package to provide incremental boosts to nearly $4 billion per year.

--CLIP
“As part of our long-term commitment to Israel’s security, the prime minister and I agreed to begin discussions on extending military assistance. Our current agreement lasts through 2017, and we’ve directed our teams to start working on extending it for the years beyond,” Obama said.

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http://www.defensenews.com/article/20130324/DEFREG02/303240005/U-S-Israel-Negotiate-Military-Aid-Extension?odyssey=tab%7Ctopnews%7Ctext%7CFRONTPAGE

March 24, 2013

WATCH: IDF Does Not Want You To See What Occupation Looks Like

According to Guy, an Israeli Ta’ayush activist and documentarian of occupation in the South Hebron Hills area of the West Bank – there has been an increase in incidents over the last month in which Israel Defense Forces soldiers have been preventing him and other Israelis from filming what goes on.

In this 7-minute video, edited together from footage taken just over the last few weeks, between February 23 and March 9, IDF soldiers – as well as high-ranking officers – are seen blocking camera lenses over and over by shoving their own smart phones in front of them. This is not only petty and immature, but also illegal, according to Israeli military law and High Court rulings. Any IDF soldier is permitted to be filmed while on duty and there is no legal restriction on filming whatsoever.

So what does the “most moral army in the world” have to hide? Well for one thing, all this footage is used to build legal cases against the IDF, which systematically abuses the use of “closed military zone” orders in these parts, kicking out Palestinians from their agricultural lands along with Israeli activists, instead of dealing with the belligerent settlers who are the ones initiating the confrontations. But also, because occupation is very ugly, so who would want it getting out?

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http://972mag.com/watch-idf-does-not-want-you-to-see-what-occupation-looks-like/68129/

March 24, 2013

Syrian Opposition Plunges Into Disarray As Leader Quits And Military Chief Rejects New PM

Mar 24, 5:13 PM (ET)
By BEN HUBBARD

BEIRUT (AP) - Syria's opposition plunged into disarray Sunday as its president quit and its military chief refused to recognize the newly elected prime minister of an interim government for rebel-held areas.

The moves reflected deep splits in the body the U.S. and its allies hope will emerge as the united face of the opposition and advance the fight to topple President Bashar Assad's regime.

--CLIP
Despite electing a new, U.S.-educated prime minister last week to head a planned interim government, the Coalition has failed to make much of a mark inside Syria, where hundreds of independent rebel brigades are fighting a civil war against Assad's forces.

Reflecting the growing dissension over that move, the head of the Coalition's military branch, Gen. Salim Idris, said his group refused to recognize the new prime minister, a little-known IT professional from Texas, because he lacked broad support among the opposition.

"For the purpose of giving power to a prime minister to unite the revolutionary forces and lead the Syrian revolution toward certain victory, we unequivocally declare that the Free Syrian Army ... conditions its support and cooperation on the achievement of a political agreement on the name of a prime minister," Idris said in an online video.

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http://apnews.myway.com/article/20130324/DA57MP300.html