A new report on global wealth says that Europe has overtaken the United States to become the richest region in the world. But the Americans still have more millionaires then the EU — and should you want to marry one, you might be better off in Singapore or the Middle East. (full article…)

The Iranian regime has developed, with the assistance of European telecommunications companies, one of the world’s most sophisticated mechanisms for controlling and censoring the Internet, allowing it to examine the content of individual online communications on a massive scale. (more…)

The United States and European Union train and support Mr. Abbas’s troops in the hope of creating a strong enough force to prevent Hamas from challenging its West Bank rule and ultimately perhaps helping Mr. Abbas back into Gaza. (more…)

A Gallup poll examining Muslim integration in major European countries has shown that Muslims identify more strongly with the countries they live in than the average in the population. (more…)

The truth about our foreign minister – and this is no scoop, it’s old news everywhere, but a lot of people have conveniently forgotten it – is that he used to belong to Kach. He is a one-time member of a murderous anti-Arab movement, one whose ideology is summed up in the chant “death to the Arabs,” one that was banned here and is listed by the US and EU as a terrorist organization. (more…)

On Saturday December 27, the latest US-Israeli attack on helpless Palestinians was launched. The attack had been meticulously planned, for over 6 months according to the Israeli press. The planning had two components: military and propaganda. It was based on the lessons of Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon, which was considered to be poorly planned and badly advertised. We may, therefore, be fairly confident that most of what has been done and said was pre-planned and intended.

That surely includes the timing of the assault: shortly before noon, when children were returning from school and crowds were milling in the streets of densely populated Gaza City. It took only a few minutes to kill over 225 people and wound 700, an auspicious opening to the mass slaughter of defenseless civilians trapped in a tiny cage with nowhere to flee. (more…)

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who visited the Gaza Strip last week, called for a “full investigation,” Amnesty International is accusing Israel of “war crimes,” and Louis Michel, the EU’s commissioner for aid to developing countries, says: “It is evident that Israel does not respect international humanitarian law.” (more…)

Addressing Israeli college students in a Tel Aviv suburb Tuesday, Livni bragged that European leaders came to Jerusalem to work with Israeli leaders despite the international uproar over the Palestinian civilian toll during fighting. (more…)

And not one European leader travelling to the region suggested the survivors might be helped if Israel, the EU and the US ended the food and fuel siege of Gaza. (more…)

European plans to turn Israel into a “privileged” partner enjoying special political, diplomatic and trade links were frozen by Brussels today in protest at the Israeli onslaught in Gaza. (more…)

The breakdown of an entire society is happening in front of us, but there is little international response beyond UN warnings which are ignored. The European Union announced recently that it wanted to strengthen its relationship with Israel while the Israeli leadership openly calls for a large-scale invasion of the Gaza Strip and continues its economic stranglehold over the territory with, it appears, the not-so-tacit support of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah – which has been co-operating with Israel on a number of measures. (more…)

It has been two weeks since Israel imposed a complete closure of Gaza, after months when its crossings have been open only for the most minimal of humanitarian supplies. Now it is even worse: two weeks without United Nations food trucks for the 80% of the population entirely dependent on food aid, and no medical supplies or drugs for Gaza’s ailing hospitals. No fuel (paid for by the EU) for Gaza’s electricity plant, and no fuel for the generators during the long blackouts. Last Monday morning, 33 trucks of food for UN distribution were finally let in – a few days of few supplies for very few, but as the UN asks, then what?

Israel’s official explanation for blocking even minimal humanitarian aid, according to IDF spokesperson Major Peter Lerner, was “continued rocket fire and security threats at the crossings”. Israel’s blockade, in force since Hamas seized control of Gaza in mid-2007, can be described as an intensification of policies designed to isolate the population of Gaza, cripple its economy, and incentivise the population against Hamas by harsh – and illegal – measures of collective punishment. However, these actions are not all new: the blockade is but the terminal end of Israel’s closure policy, in place since 1991, which in turn builds on Israel’s policies as occupier since 1967. (more…)

The Palestinian Authority (PA) in Ramallah has blocked access to a popular news website because of the site’s reporting on widespread corruption among the entourage of PA President Mahmoud Abbas.

For several days, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have been unable to view the website Donia al-Watan (http://www.alwatanvoice.com) as access has been blocked through the PA-controlled telecom company. Readers outside Palestine and a few inside the country using proxies are still able to access the site.

The Electronic Intifada confirmed that several users attempting to access the website in Ramallah and other parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank could not do so and instead saw a message in English stating “We are sorry, the site was blocked based on attorney General instructions [sic].” (more…)

Signataire du manifeste du Forum social de Porto Alegre (”Douze propositions pour un autre monde possible”), en 2005, vous êtes considéré comme l’un des inspirateurs du mouvement altermondialiste. Vous avez fondé et dirigé le Centre Fernand-Braudel pour l’étude de l’économie des systèmes historiques et des civilisations de l’université de l’Etat de New York, à Binghamton. Comment replacez-vous la crise économique et financière actuelle dans le “temps long” de l’histoire du capitalisme ? Immanuel Wallerstein : Fernand Braudel (1902-1985) distinguait le temps de la “longue durée”, qui voit se succéder dans l’histoire humaine des systèmes régissant les rapports de l’homme à son environnement matériel, et, à l’intérieur de ces phases, le temps des cycles longs conjoncturels, décrits par des économistes comme Nicolas Kondratieff (1982-1930) ou Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950). Nous sommes aujourd’hui clairement dans une phase B d’un cycle de Kondratieff qui a commencé il y a trente à trente-cinq ans, après une phase A qui a été la plus longue (de 1945 à 1975) des cinq cents ans d’histoire du système capitaliste.

Dans une phase A, le profit est généré par la production matérielle, industrielle ou autre ; dans une phase B, le capitalisme doit, pour continuer à générer du profit, se financiariser et se réfugier dans la spéculation. Depuis plus de trente ans, les entreprises, les Etats et les ménages s’endettent, massivement. Nous sommes aujourd’hui dans la dernière partie d’une phase B de Kondratieff, lorsque le déclin virtuel devient réel, et que les bulles explosent les unes après les autres : les faillites se multiplient, la concentration du capital augmente, le chômage progresse, et l’économie connaît une situation de déflation réelle. (more…)

Karim, the Palestinian who drove me to the Gaza Strip, was very quiet. As we sped out of Jerusalem in his comfortable private taxi, he said very little, except to ask if I would give his friend Rami a box of cigarettes when I arrived. “I’ve worked with Rami for eight years now,” he said, “but I’ve never seen him. He cannot come out of Gaza, and I can’t go inside.”

An hour later we reached the Erez terminal. It looks like an airport hangar; grey, immense, featureless. Erez is the main Israeli crossing to the Gaza Strip; but the journey starts long before you reach Erez. First you have to apply in writing for Israeli security clearance to enter the Strip. Since declaring the Gaza Strip “a hostile entity” on September 19 last year, Israel has tightened its siege of Gaza, and many people, including UN personnel, are refused clearance without explanation.

Inside Erez, it took me a couple of hours to clear security and start wheeling my suitcase through the grey corridors and into Gaza. Emerging from Erez, the first thing I saw was destruction; shattered buildings surrounded by mounds of rubble. Rami was waiting for me, smoking. “Welcome to Gaza,” he smiled.

(more…)

Aghast at the atrocities committed by US forces invading the Philippines, and the rhetorical flights about liberation and noble intent that routinely accompany crimes of state, Mark Twain threw up his hands at his inability to wield his formidable weapon of satire. The immediate object of his frustration was the renowned General Funston. “No satire of Funston could reach perfection,” Twain lamented, “because Funston occupies that summit himself… [he is] satire incarnated.”

It is a thought that often comes to mind, again in August 2008 during the Russia-Georgia-Ossetia war. George Bush, Condoleezza Rica and other dignitaries solemnly invoked the sanctity of the United Nations, warning that Russia could be excluded from international institutions “by taking actions in Georgia that are inconsistent with” their principles. The sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations must be rigorously honored, they intoned – “all nations,” that is, apart from those that the US chooses to attack: Iraq, Serbia, perhaps Iran, and a list of others too long and familiar to mention. (more…)

It’s a very negative signal that the International Quartet Envoy Tony Blair’s planned trip to the Gaza was cancelled yesterday, Tuesday 15th July, following what was described as “specific security threats that made the visit impossible”.

As a delegation of the European Parliament we visited, last June, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Gaza Strip, West Bank and East Jerusalem. Our visit in Gaza was perfectly coordinated by UNRWA, and we didn’t feel any sort of insecurity, but only despair and responsibility looking at the living conditions of the Palestinian population under an illegal siege (don’t worry we also went to see the danger and the damages of the rockets fired on Sderot).

I really hope that the Israeli authorities’ pressures or other forces are not behind this decision by Tony Blair not to go to Gaza Strip, using the threat of security in order to prevent to witness the disaster of the blockade.

Palestinians, both in West Bank and in Gaza Strip, deplored the fact that Tony Blair had never visited the Strip, despite of the duties related to his role as Quartet Representative that include mobilizing international assistance to the Palestinians, working closely with donors and others, as well as helping to implement plans and concrete projects aimed to promote Palestinian economic development. (more…)

When Majid Ezzati thinks about declining life expectancy, he says, “I think of an epidemic like HIV, or I think of the collapse of a social system, like in the former Soviet Union.” But such a decline is happening right now in some parts of the United States. Between 1983 and 1999, men’s life expectancy decreased in more than 50 U.S. counties, according to a recent study by Ezzati, associate professor of international health at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), and colleagues. For women, the news was even worse: life expectancy decreased in more than 900 counties—more than a quarter of the total. This means 4 percent of American men and 19 percent of American women can expect their lives to be shorter than or, at best, the same length as those of people in their home counties two decades ago.

The United States no longer boasts anywhere near the world’s longest life expectancy. It doesn’t even make the top 40. In this and many other ways, the richest nation on earth is not the healthiest. Ezzati’s finding is unsettling on its face, but scholars find further cause for concern in the pattern of health disparities. Poor health is not distributed evenly across the population, but concentrated among the disadvantaged.

Disparities in health tend to fall along income lines everywhere: the poor generally get sicker and die sooner than the rich. But in the United States, the gap between the rich and the poor is far wider than in most other developed democracies, and it is getting wider. That is true both before and after taxes: the United States also does less than most other rich democracies to redistribute income from the rich to the poor. (more…)

Αt what point does rhetoric stop and effective action begin? For Palestinians, decades of dialogue and supposed peace overtures have proved fruitless, only serving to protect the status quo: sixty years of continual dispossession, forty years of occupation, and a systematic repudiation of international and humanitarian law. The situation for Palestinians will not improve without constructive movement forward—which rejects collusion with the Israeli government by exercising boycott, divestment and sanctions (known as BDS).

During the 1980’s, BDS of South Africa included a cultural boycott whereby musicians and artists from around the world were prohibited from performing in the apartheid state. In addition to internationally supporting the subjugated black population, this policy was instituted to express that no real dialogue—economic, academic, or cultural—could take place in concert with the atrocities of apartheid. With regard to Israel, the implementation of international BDS is but one necessary measure to shift the balance away from the oppressor and help place it in the hands of the oppressed. (more…)