Israel should heed ex-Mossad head's Iran attack warning

Former Mossad intelligence agency head Meir Dagan is afraid and concerned. Most of the politicians, and amazingly (and absurdly ) enough, also a large number of journalists, want him to be quiet. They don't want him to get us upset with his fears or arouse us from our slumber with his warnings. We'll just leave the fateful decision of whether to attack Iran to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, and to them alone, and let the storm over the issue subside.As if blind, we will follow them and be led by them straight into the midst of the danger.

There is no clearer symptom of the sickly state of public discourse in Israel than efforts at silencing Dagan, as well as the smears now directed at him. As Mossad head, he managed to stop this adventurism, and now when he has retired and left the decision-making arena to the prime minister and defense minister, whom he views as dangerous, he has decided to break his silence.

He should be commended for his responsible and courageous act. If Dagan the civilian is worried, if he thinks it's a matter of a threat to our existence at our doorstep, it is not only his right to make himself heard, it is his supreme duty. He should attempt to stop it, to act as a gatekeeper. If he acted otherwise, he would have been abusing his role as former Mossad director.

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Source: Ha'aret 

Post office workers to go on strike in Montreal as talks drag on

Mail service will be disrupted in Montreal on Monday as urban postal workers are poised to walk off the job.

The Canadian Union of Postal Workers says it has selected Quebec's largest city as the next target in its rotating strikes.

So far Winnipeg and Hamilton have been hit.

“Postal workers are staying out on strike to keep the pressure on negotiations,” CUPW president Denis Lemelin said in a statement. “We will not accept the rollbacks that a profitable company is trying to force us to swallow.”

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Source: Globe & Mail 

Judge gives reasons for firearms acquittal — two years later

When an Ontario Superior Court judge acquitted two men of firearms offences two years ago after finding police had violated their Charter rights, she promised to email her full reasons that afternoon.

On Wednesday, the Crown will ask the province’s highest court to order a new trial because, as it turned out, those written reasons never came.

“The trial judge not only fell short in her obligation to explain to the public why these gun-toting individuals were acquitted and put back into circulation on our streets, she abdicated her responsibility entirely,” the Crown argues in its factum filed with the Ontario Court of Appeal.

But there’s a wrinkle.

Last month, Ontario Superior Court Justice Susanne Goodman released a thorough, 42-page strongly worded decision detailing why she had concluded — two years earlier — that Toronto police officers violated the Charter by making an “arbitrary and unreasonable” decision to pull over Kamar Cunningham and Troy Matthews on March 6, 2008.

She also found officers “outright lied” in court and fabricated evidence. Goodman, for instance, wrote she did not accept officers’ testimony that they pulled over the men, both black, because they weren’t wearing seat belts.

“I was satisfied that the police flagrantly and intentionally violated the defendants’ rights under both sections 8 and 9 of the Charter. They then egregiously supported their actions by providing a false account of the events leading up to it.”

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Source: Toronto Star 

Israeli troops battle protesters in Syria, 20 dead

JERUSALEM—In another challenge to Israel inspired by the pro-democracy movements in neighbouring Arab states, hundreds of Palestinians marched Sunday on Israel’s border with Syria leading to a deadly clash with the army.

After calling on the marchers to stop, an army spokesman said, Israeli soldiers opened fire at their legs. State-run Syrian TV said 20 people were killed, including a woman and teenage boy, and 325 were wounded, 12 critically.

Ambulances raced to the hospital in the Syrian border town of Quneitra with the wounded and dead.

It was the second time in less than a month that Palestinians have tried to walk across Israel’s borders. Last time, during the demonstrations to mark the “nakba” or the catastrophe, which is what Palestinians call the creation of Israel, dozens of Palestinians succeeded in crossing the border, and 15 were killed.

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Source: Toronto Star 

Obama, Bush, and the Patriot Act

Minutes before midnight on May 26, President Obama, in Paris, by a species of teleportable pen signed into law a four-year extension of the Patriot Act: the central domestic support of the security apparatus devised by the Bush administration, after the bombings of 11 September 2001 and the 'anthrax letters' a week later. The first Patriot Act passed the senate on 25 October 2001, by a vote of 98-1 -- the opposing vote coming from Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin. In the years that followed, a minority view developed, which said that the Patriot Act 'went too far'; but its steadiest opponents have come from outside the mainstream media: the American Civil Liberties Union, the Cato Institute, and libertarian columnists such as Glenn Greenwald and Nat Hentoff.

In the last few days, two senators, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, took up the mantle of Senator Feingold (who lost his bid for re-election in the anti-Obama midterm disaster of 2010). Both spoke against a government interpretation of the new Patriot Act, which has not yet been shared with the American people.

The senate as a whole voted (this time 72-23) to renew a law that citizens have had no opportunity to understand, as Wyden and Udall present it, and that few members of Congress have looked into, even to the limited extent allowed. The Patriot Act controls secret investigations. The government, however, according to Wyden, has a private understanding of the law. This interpretation has been classified. So the meaning of a law about secrets is hidden because the government's view of the law is itself a secret.

It would be wrong to see the latest curtain against transparency as marking a change of policy. True, Obama promised, in the Democratic primaries of 2008, to filibuster against a proposed amnesty for telecoms firms that illegally co-operated with a request by the Office of the Vice President to divulge information about their customers. The conduct of the telecoms firms was a violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which forbade eavesdropping on Americans without judicial oversight. But in July 2008, once Obama had secured the Democratic nomination, this became the first promise on which he reneged. It set a pattern for an administration that in its earliest days adopted a slogan which would cover many further amnesties: 'We look to the future, not the past.'

Civil liberties had never been a leading concern for Obama in earlier years. His short previous record in politics associated him with the use of government as a benign agency for the protection of citizens and the subsidized extension of social opportunity. When, from the office of state senator in Illinois and U.S. senator, he ascended to the presidency in 2009, he could no longer think of himself as an advocate of the less fortunate; rather, he was the protector of all Americans; and the responsibility for 'protection' of Americans (a paraconstitutional notion innovated by George W. Bush and picked up by Obama) involves an all-absorbing concern with safety against 'the terror threat'.

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Source: Huffington Post 

Agriculture Industry Fears Disaster If Illegal Immigration Enforcement Program E-Verify Is Implemented

WASHINGTON -- The agriculture industry fears a disaster is on the horizon if the one bit of new immigration policy that Congress seems to agree on becomes law.

A plan to require all American businesses to run their employees through E-Verify, a program that confirms each is legally entitled to work in the U.S., could wreak havoc on an industry where 80 percent of the field workers are illegal immigrants. So could the increased paperwork audits already under way by the Obama administration.

"We are headed toward a train wreck," said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat whose district includes agriculture-rich areas. "The stepped up (workplace) enforcement has brought this to a head."

Lofgren said farmers are worried that their work force is about to disappear. They say they want to hire legal workers and U.S. citizens, but that it's nearly impossible, given the relatively low wages and back-breaking work.

Wages can range from minimum wage to more than $20 an hour. But workers often are paid by the piece; the faster they work, they more they make. A steady income lasts only as long as the planting and harvesting seasons, which can be measured in weeks.

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Source: Huffington Post 

Bradley Manning Supporters Rally At Kansas Prison

WASHINGTON -- Hundreds of supporters of Bradley Manning converged at Leavenworth, Kan., Saturday to rally for the Army private accused of leaking classified documents to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.

Gathered outside the prison where Manning is currently being held, protesters denounced Manning's treatment and called on the White House to drop all charges against him.

"PFC Bradley Manning is a fellow soldier," Brian Wolfe, a Kansas-based Army Veteran who served in Operation Iraqi Freedom, said in an email statement. "If a fellow soldier is punished for taking his oath to defend the constitution seriously, what does that mean for our military and for our democracy?"

The event marked the first public rally in support of Manning since he was transferred to Fort Leavenworth in April after being imprisoned for nine months on the Quantico Marine Corps Base in Virginia.

While detained at Quantico, Manning was forced to sleep naked in a military jail after a commander of the brig ordered his clothes be taken away for a full seven hours. He was also forced to stand naked outside his cell in front of the rest of the clothed inmates until he passed inspection and was given his clothes back.

"The information Bradley Manning is accused of releasing should have been in the public domain. Whoever revealed it is an American hero." said Jeff Paterson, a Steering Committee member of the Bradley Manning Support Network who also spoke at the rally, in a statement. "Our leaders in Washington need to return to American principles of transparent and accountable government. That starts with protecting -- not prosecuting -- whistle-blowers and dropping all charges against Bradley Manning."

Manning stands accused of revealing tens of thousands of classified U.S. military and State Department documents that some believe helped to catalyze democratic revolts across the Middle East this spring. His trial is slated to begin this summer.

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Source: Huffington Post 

Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reaching Record Highs

AMSTERDAM -- Despite 20 years of effort, greenhouse gas emissions are going up instead of down, hitting record highs as climate negotiators gather to debate a new global warming accord.

The new report by the International Energy Agency showing high emissions from fossil fuels is one of several pieces of bad news facing delegates from about 180 countries heading to Bonn, Germany, for two weeks of talks beginning Monday.

Another: The tsunami-triggered nuclear disaster in March apparently has sidelined Japan's aggressive policies to combat climate change and prompted countries like Germany to hasten the decommissioning of nuclear power stations which, regardless of other drawbacks, have nearly zero carbon emissions.

"Japan's energy future is in limbo," says analyst Endre Tvinnereim of the consultancy firm Point Carbon. The fallout from the catastrophe has "put climate policy further down the priority list," and the short-term effect in Japan – one of the world's most carbon-efficient countries – will be more burning of fossil fuels, he said.

And despite the expansion of renewable energy around the world, the Paris-based IEA's report said energy-related carbon emissions last year topped 30 gigatons, 5 percent more than the previous record in 2008. With energy investments locked into coal- and oil-fueled infrastructure, that situation will change little over the next decade, it said.

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Source: Huffington Post  

Wealth inequality is as extreme today as it was during the Great Depression years

92% Of Americans Are Socialists They Just Don’t Know It

Wealth inequality is as extreme today as it was during the Great Depression years. In real terms, the wealthy hold the majority of this nation’s wealth and income. The problem in this country is mass disillusionment. In a recent study by Duke and Harvard University they found many Americans believe that the top 20% of our nation’s wealthiest own 60% of the wealth. The real figure is the top 20% own 84% of our nation’s wealth and it is increasing every year.

When the respondents were asked to pick an unlabeled pie chart “How much should the top 20% own?” 92% of them preferred the Swedish model of income distribution over the current American economic model. The Swedish economic model, which is the top 20% own 36% of the nation’s wealth.

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Source: PoliticusUSA  

Robert Gates: Only Modest Troop Reductions In Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan — U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates appealed for patience with an unpopular war and said Saturday that only modest U.S. troop reductions would make sense this summer in a still unstable Afghanistan.

On his 12th and final visit to Afghanistan as Pentagon chief, Gates held out the possibility of a turning point in the war by year's end. But Gates, who's retiring June 30, said much depends on whether the death of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden creates a new opening for peace negotiations with leaders of the Taliban insurgency.

This and other aspects of the war, now in its 10th year, were on the agenda for Gates' meetings Saturday with Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. and NATO commander here, and with U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry. A decision on U.S. troop reductions is expected in the next couple of weeks.

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Source: Huffington Post