Taliban exploit Pakistan emergency
Aljazeera.net
Officials in the Swat valley in Pakistan say Taliban fighters are tightening their grip on some areas in the north-west of the country close to the border with Afghanistan. The rising violence near the frontier was one justification for the current state of emergency declared by General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president. Pro-Taliban fighters have advanced in recent days and the government says they now control as much as 70 per cent of the Swat valley. They have taken control of public buildings, including police stations….

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Palestinian International Campaign-End Gaza Seige
On 25 October, a Palestinian patient died at Erez crossing while awaiting being allowed to cross to Israeli hospital. A week ago, a woman died in Gaza hospital with her newly born baby, while awaiting permit to be transferred to Israel for medical treatment. These are not the first victims, and will certainly not be the last should the current situation continue to prevail. Last week, the operations rooms in Gaza’s main hospital were shut down due to the lack of medical gases, which was not allowed by the Israelis. Today Israel does not allow except 12 basic items to enter Gaza, out of over 9,000 commodities. From soap to coffee, from water to soft drinks, from fuel to gas, from computers to spare parts, from cement to raw materials for industry, all and hundred other items are not allowed into Gaza today….

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17,000 sham names getting monthly salaries – anti-corruption board
Voices of Iraq
The Iraqi anti-corruption board revealed there are 17,000 false names receiving monthly salaries from the state institutions, adding that files that had to do with corruption were lost. Moussa Faraj, the board chief, during a press conference on Saturday, attributed the spread of corruption to the large financial appropriations cashed without any control or monitoring, not to mention the “clear weakness in the anti-corruption agencies’ performance.” “The current strategy at the board is to focus on the basic aspects for citizens, including the poverty under which 60 percent of the Iraqis are groaning,” said Faraj, noting “committees will be established to detect causes of poverty in all provinces.”…

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Countdown to the offensive
Saleh Al-Naami, Al-Ahram Weekly
Last Sunday Zaher Al-Orr had a surprise for his son Ashraf and his friend Mohamed Abu Herbid. He prepared breakfast for them before going home, after their night shift. The three worked as guards in a bathroom fittings factory near Jabalya refugee camp in northern Gaza. Normally they would have breakfast after returning from work. But this was going to be a special morning. Another worker who clocked in early joined them in the meal. Things didn’t go exactly as Al-Orr planned. Minutes after the men sat down to eat an Israeli artillery shell exploded on their dining table. All four men died…

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Palestinian Folklore Dancing Banned in a US School
Sabbah’s blog
Now this is the most disgusting piece of news I’ve read today: OLD SAYBROOK, Conn. – Officials in Old Saybrook have canceled performances by a Palestinian dance troupe after getting a complaint that it is offensive to Jews and Israel. The decision involves planned performances at the town’s elementary and middle schools by Al-Ghad Folklore Dancing Troupe. Town resident Ginger Horton says she felt compelled to complain to school officials after her two grandchildren told her they were offended by the troupe’s performance at the high school Monday. Here is the yucky part: Horton says the grandchildren told her the high school performance depicted Israeli soldiers beating and torturing Palestinians. School Superintendent Joseph Onofrio says he canceled further performances after learning several parents questioned whether it was appropriate for their children…

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Abbas forces threaten Palestinian citizen who said he was tortured by them
Palestinian Information Center
Members of the infamous PA preventive security in the West Bank have threatened to kill Palestinian citizen Dawood Rawajbah, 32, of Nablus city for publicly speaking to the media about being tortured by elements of that group at the PA Beitonia jail in Ramallah city. The Gaza-based Al-Aqsa satellite TV aired an interview with Rawajaba where he spoke about the horror in the Beitonia jail. Local sources in Rawjbah’s village affirmed that elements of the preventive security were searching for those who carried out the interview with Rawajba after he refused to identify them….

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Extreme Makeover…
Layla Anwar, An Arab Woman Blues
I need to be relooked, made over… I need to be revamped, refurbished, reshaped, remodeled, redone – All brand new. I need a new wardrobe, new shoes, new furniture, new home, new car, new eyes, new body, new blood…A new heart. I need a new passport, a new identity, a new name, a new nationality, a new language… I need a new map, new borders, a new flag, a new country… I need a new land, new neighbors, new people, new faces… Someone find me a plastic surgeon. A surgeon for the heart, the mind, the soul…Give me a new bag of new memories…Anything, give me anything away from the “New” Iraq….

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Two Palestinian children killed in Gaza at the hands of IOF troops
Palestinian Information Center
Two Palestinian children were killed on Saturday in Breij refugee camp in central Gaza Strip at the hands of the Israeli occupation forces near the fence separating Gaza from the 1948 occupied lands. Palestinian medical sources said that the two children of one family were 15 and 14 years old and had arrived at the hospital dead. The two bodies were carried to hospital after the IOF armored vehicles retreated from the area where they were bulldozing citizens’ lands….

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Statement by the official spokesperson for Arab Baath Socialist Party
Albasrah.net published that the official Ba’ath Party’s spokesperson denied that the Ba’ath Party authorized anybody to attend Dead Sea meeting in Jordan and to the one in Istanbul. The Ba’ath Party confirms that it is determined to continue the resistance for the liberation of Iraq and confirms what it already stated last year in the Political Program of the Baath Party and its Patriotic Resistance….

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A New Low in U. S. Behavior
Legitimizing Torture
ROBERT FANTINA
The U.S. now has an Attorney General, Mr. Michael Mukasey, who does not know if waterboarding is torture. One wonders what else escapes the knowledge of the Mr. Mukasey. Is he aware that U.S. law forbids the practice of waterboarding, as do numerous international treaties? He has stated that he must withhold judgment on it until he receives more information. Will he continue to ‘withhold judgment’ on this practice, that he himself calls ‘repugnant,’ until some nation starts waterboarding U.S. soldiers? One may well ask why other countries, especially those with whom the U.S. is at war, should hesitate to waterboard their prisoners if the U.S. will not refrain from doing so. The answer is common decency, but with the world’s most powerful nation not demonstrating that trait, one cannot long expect other nations victimized by the United States to exhibit it….

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Bush shoots Iraqi insurgents – virtually
US president engages in shoot-out with ‘bad guys’ in computer game simulating firefight in Baghdad.
Middle East Online
US President George W. Bush had a shoot-out with the “bad guys” in Iraq on Thursday, playing a computer game with war veterans that simulates a firefight in Baghdad, the White House said. Bush tried his hand at the game with two soldiers during a visit to a rehabilitation center in Texas that treats veterans wounded in Iraq. White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Bush helped “shoot the bad guys” in a Baghdad neighborhood, albeit virtually. She said the president saw several “cutting edge virtual reality games” that allow recovering soldiers at the center in San Antonio to simulate riding in a car or boat….

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Abbas must resign now
Comment By Khalid Amayreh
Shortly before he was elected as successor to the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in January 2005, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, aka known as Abu Mazen, pledged to preserve the human and national rights of the Palestinian people. However, nearly three years later, it is manifestly clear that Abbas has utterly failed to honor his pledges. At the national level, Abbas has committed a series of unforgivable blunders which provide a sufficient legal ground for his dismissal…

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The Other Side of Sderot
umkahlil
Comment I left re a post entitled “The Other Side of Collective Punishment” in the Guardian by once-upon-a-time London stockbroker turned lion for Zion Seth Freedman. In the past three years ten Israelis have been killed by Qassams. In the first week of November, Israel’s Occupation Forces killed five Palestinians in Gaza, but in typical weird London stockbroker occupier assumes role of victim mode, Freedman in his ode to Sderot admonishes Palestinians not to play the ‘numbers’ game….

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Meet Abu Abed: the US’s new ally against al-Qaida
With summary beatings and imprisonments, he has the methods of a mafia don. But he and others like him are crucial to American strategy
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, Guardian
…A senior Sunni sheikh, whose tribe is joining the new alliance with the Americans against al-Qaida, told me in Beirut that it was a simple equation for him. “It’s just a way to get arms, and to be a legalised security force to be able to stand against Shia militias and to prevent the Iraqi army and police from entering their areas,” he said. “The Americans lost hope with an Iraqi government that is both sectarian and dominated by militias, so they are paying for locals to fight al-Qaida. It will create a series of warlords. “It’s like someone who brought cats to fight rats, found himself with too many cats and brought dogs to fight the cats. Now they need elephants.”…

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Eyewitness report: Another kangaroo court hearing at Gitmo
Mary Shaw, Nov 10 2007
They’re still bumbling around trying to figure out what to do with all our so-called enemy combatants. Yesterday, November 9, was their third attempt at arraigning Omar Khadr. My friend Jumana Musa, an attorney who serves as Advocacy Director for Domestic Human Rights and International Justice for Amnesty International USA, was there to observe and report on the proceedings. Some of her findings were disturbing, to say the least….

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23 gunmen killed in clashes near Samarra
Salah al-Din
Twenty-three gunmen were killed in violent clashes between warring armed factions east and south of the city of Samarra, an official security source in Salah al-Din province said on Saturday. “Gunmen from the Islamic Army Organization attacked positions of the al-Qaeda Organization in Iraq in the villages of Banat al-Hassan, al-Mutasem and al-Jalam, south and east of Samarra, on Friday evening and Saturday morning,” the source told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI) on condition of anonymity. “According to information available so far, 18 gunmen of al-Qaeda were killed and 16 others arrested by fighters of the Islamic Army Organization,” the source said….

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1920 Revolution Brigades: Operation “Rock Hard”
Roads to Iraq
1920 Revolution Brigades announced today the following: After the occupation forces declared the brutal military “Iron Hammer” campaign in the northern provinces of our beloved country, your brothers from 1920 Revolution Brigades in these provinces prepared themselves, their ambushes and booby-traps to respond with the operation “Rock Hard” campaign, which is going to break the occupation’s “Iron Hammer”….

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APR – The Arrest of Red Crescent Director
Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq (AMSI)
…The American occupation forces arrested Amer Muhammad Hussein the director of Red Crescent office and his brother from the house in Al Azra village in Tarimiya. The crime occurred when the occupation forces surrounded the house and broke the furniture tampering with the contents of the house. These forces arrested the citizens and brought them to an unknown destination. This crime is added to the series of crimes carried out by these forces against those areas that are rejecting the occupation and his aides. The Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq (AMSI) condemns this crime; carrying the occupation forces and the current government fully responsible….

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6 U.S. troops die in Afghan ambush
2007 is the deadliest in Afghanistan since 2001 invasion
CNN
Six American forces serving under NATO’s International Security Assistance Force were killed in an insurgent ambush while patrolling in eastern Afghanistan, a NATO spokesman told CNN on Saturday. Friday’s deaths make this year the deadliest since the 2001 invasion for U.S. military personnel. In addition, eight other NATO soldiers were wounded. It was not immediately clear whether those were Americans. The U.S. troops were on joint-foot patrol with Afghan National Army soldiers — three of whom were killed and 11 who were wounded, NATO said….

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Saturday: 1 US Soldier, 58 Iraqis Killed; 35 Iraqis Wounded
Margaret Griffis, Antiwar.com
At least 58 Iraqis were killed and 35 more were wounded in various attacks. A major clash left 33 dead in Samarra, though some of the fighters were foreign. One MND-North soldier was killed and three more were wounded during an explosion in Diyala province. Meanwhile, the Iraqi government is moving to closer to passing an anti-immunity law that could cause foreign contractors to end operations there…

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Our problematic UN ambassador
Khalid Amayreh in Ramallah
There have been troubling signals of late concerning the head of the Palestinian mission to the United Nations, Mr. Riyadh Mansour, which raises questions and question marks about his competence, professionalism and even patriotism. If true, these signals should be more than sufficient for a strong-worded rebuke, even outright dismissal. A few days ago, Mansour reportedly circulated a draft UN resolution, vilifying the Palestinian Islamic resistance movement, Hamas, as a “terrorist organization.” The audacity of the feat, which was utterly rejected by Arab, Muslim and third world diplomats at the UN headquarters in New York, raised a lot of eyebrows here in Palestine….

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