Young Israelis Resist Challenges to Settlements
- Details
- Written by Isabel Kershner, New York, Times Isabel Kershner, New York, Times
- Published: 08 December 2007 08 December 2007
- Hits: 5398 5398
US criticises Israeli homes plan
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- Written by BBC News BBC News
- Published: 07 December 2007 07 December 2007
- Hits: 5431 5431
The United States has voiced rare criticism of Israel, for its decision to build more homes on occupied land.
"This doesn't help build confidence," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said after meeting Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni in Brussels.
Israel said on Tuesday it had invited bids to build 300 new homes in Har Homa, a settlement in East Jerusalem. The Palestinians asked the US for help.
Israeli avoids UK arrest threat
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- Written by BBC News BBC News
- Published: 06 December 2007 06 December 2007
- Hits: 5146 5146
The foreign ministry said an "extreme leftist" organisation was likely to file a legal complaint against Public Security Minister Avi Dichter.
He was the domestic intelligence agency chief in 2002 when Israel bombed a Hamas military leader's house killing him, his bodyguard and 15 civilians.
British law allows private citizens to file complaints of alleged war crimes.
"Minister Dichter has cancelled this trip following threats of him being arrested in Great Britain. This is an intolerable situation," said his spokesman Barak Sari.
He had been invited to London as keynote speaker at a counter terrorism seminar at Kings College.
The visit was called off after the UK government had been unable to guarantee him immunity, his office said, in the event of a private citizens complaint leading to an arrest warrant for war crimes.
'Mistaken attack'
The Shin Beth agency, headed by Mr Dichter between 2000 and 2005, helped plan the assassination of Hamas military commander Saleh Shehada in July 2002.
Nine children were killed in the raid. A one-tonne bomb was dropped on Mr Shehada's house. The dead included his wife and his three children.
In the face of international condemnation, including Israel's main ally the US, Israel conducted an investigation and concluded that the raid had been a "mistake".
In 2006, the Israeli army scrapped plans to send one of its generals to a course at a British military academy over fears he could be arrested on war crimes charges.
A year earlier, former Gen Doron Almog narrowly avoided arrest for his involvement in the Shehada assassination. He refused to leave his aircraft after a tip-off by Israeli diplomats.
Correspondents say this is the first time an Israeli minister has cancelled a visit over fears of a private citizen's complaint.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/7130594.stm
Published: 2007/12/06 11:40:31 GMT
© BBC MMVII
Gaza petition, please sign - without fuel health system will collapse
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- Written by Dr Medhat Abbas and Gush Shalom Dr Medhat Abbas and Gush Shalom
- Published: 06 December 2007 06 December 2007
- Hits: 5729 5729
Subject: URGENT PETITION to END THE HEALTH CRISIS IN GAZA
Appeal - Appeal - Appeal
We have a very series shortage of diesel in the ministry of Health
the majority of the 11 hospitals of MOH do suffer from a shortage of fuel, the same is for the 52 primary health care clinics and vehicles.
I am not speaking now about the consequences but they are catastrophic and include the transportation defect which will not enable the employees of the Ministry to go to their hospitals.
Please. We urge you to help us by applying any sort of pressure that could let the Israelis change their mind about this fatal action that would threaten the lives of thousands of civilians in the already under siege Gaza.
Dr Medhat Abbas
General Director of
Crisis Management Unit
Ministry of Health, Gaza.
Contact: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Please sign this
petition to call the United Nations and the Israeli government to allow the
Palestinian patients having treatment outside
of Gaza: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/save-gaza
Read more: Gaza petition, please sign - without fuel health system will collapse
Bush told in August that Iran nuke program 'may be suspended'
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- Written by Ed Henry, CNN White House correspondent Ed Henry, CNN White House correspondent
- Published: 05 December 2007 05 December 2007
- Hits: 5217 5217
[This shows, once again, that the Bush administration's push to war with yet another country in the Middle East continues regardless of the facts on hand . . .]
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush was told in August that Iran's nuclear weapons program "may be suspended," the White House said Wednesday, which seemingly contradicts the account of the meeting given by Bush Tuesday.
Adm. Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, told Bush the new information might cause intelligence officials to change their assessment of the Iranian program, but said analysts needed to review the new data before making a final judgment, White House press secretary Dana Perino said late Wednesday.
"Director McConnell said that the new information might cause the intelligence community to change its assessment of Iran's covert nuclear program, but the intelligence community was not prepared to draw any conclusions at that point in time, and it wouldn't be right to speculate until they had time to examine and analyze the new data," Perino said in a statement issued by the White House.
The new account from Perino seems to contradict the president's version of his August conversation with McConnell and raised new questions about why Bush continued to warn the American public about a threat from Iran two months after being told a new assessment was in the works.
But Perino said there was no conflict between her statement and Bush's Tuesday account of the meeting, when he said McConnell "didn't tell me what the information was."
"The president wasn't given the specific details" of the revised intelligence estimate, which was released Monday, Perino said. Nor did Bush mislead Americans in October, when he warned of a third world war triggered by Iran's development of nuclear technology, she said.
"The president didn't say we're going to cause World War III," Perino said. "He was saying he wanted to avoid World War III."
In October, the president told reporters, "If you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon." The apparent gap between what U.S. intelligence officials knew in August and Bush's later warnings drew sharp criticism from Sen. Joseph Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a Democratic presidential candidate, who called Bush's explanation unbelievable.
"I refuse to believe that," Biden said Tuesday. "If that's true, he has the most incompetent staff in modern American history, and he's one of the most incompetent presidents in modern American history."
But Perino said there was no need for Bush to pull back on any of his public statements after the August meeting, because McConnell stressed to the president that intelligence officials still had to do "due diligence" to make sure the new information was correct.
"The director advised that there were many streams of information that had the potential to be in conflict, and it would take more time to vet it all to determine validity, and that's why they were not able to meet the deadline," she said in the prepared statement.
Perino said her account came from a conversation that McConnell had Wednesday with another White House official. Earlier, Perino's deputy, Tony Fratto, had refused to provide reporters with further details about the August meeting between Bush and McConnell.
The Bush administration has spent years warning that Iran's development of nuclear power plants and enriched uranium masked an effort to produce an atomic bomb. But in a reversal of a 2005 report, the National Intelligence Estimate released Monday concluded that Iran suspended nuclear weapons work in late 2003 and was unlikely to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a bomb until at least 2010.
Instead of focusing on that reversal, Bush has continued to stress that the report confirms long-standing suspicions that Iran had a nuclear weapons program in the first place. He said Wednesday that Tehran "has more to explain about its nuclear intentions and past actions," including a weapons program "which the Iranian regime has yet to acknowledge."
But Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the report was "a declaration of victory" for Iran in the face of international pressure to suspend his country's production of nuclear fuel.
"Iran is a peaceful nuclear country now, and they have all accepted Iran as a nuclear country and have announced they will stand a nuclear Iran," Ahmadinejad said Wednesday.
But Bush said Tuesday the report "doesn't do anything to change my opinion about the danger Iran poses to the world." And Perino called Ahmadinejad a "liar" Wednesday, because the new NIE shows that Tehran did have a clandestine nuclear weapons program at one time.
"If anyone wants to call the president a liar, they are misreading the situation for their own political purposes," Perino said. "The liar is Ahmadinejad, and he has a lot of explaining to do."
In the August meeting, the White House said, McConnell told Bush "that the intelligence community would not be able to meet a congressionally imposed deadline requiring a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran because new information had been obtained."
Perino said this information showed the White House was correct in believing that Iran had a nuclear weapons program, which it halted only because of Bush's policies.
"The international pressure -- and the president's approach -- has worked," she said.